Improving wiki article quality through crowd coordination: A resource allocation approach

In this paper the authors propose a crowd coordination mechanism to increase the quality of articles produced in wiki systems. Wikis constitute promising social digital ecosystems for collaborative knowledge creation on the Web. However, as a result of the purely self-coordinated manner that they function, they cannot ensure the quality of the produced articles - an issue that affects their reliability and acceptance. The authors show that wiki article quality optimization can be formulated as a resource allocation problem. Contributors are selected from the wiki community crowd according to their skills, and matched to the articles they can improve the most. A model of the English Wikipedia is given, parameterized and validated from recent field study results. Experimental results were obtained with simulation systems implementing this model and on a series of scenarios, which include an analysis of the impact of using semantic relations between wiki domains. The obtained results indicate that the proposed mechanism can lead to the production of wiki articles of higher quality, compared to the respective results achieved by the fully self-coordinated wiki.