Seek the Consent, Respect the Dissent: An Analysis of User Behaviors in Online Collaborative Community

摘要

Wikipedia is the biggest online encyclopedia whose knowledge producing process features distributed collaboration. However, its openness and tolerance of disagreements seem contrary to the objective of achieving overall consensuses. To figure out what the key is to make this paradoxical editing mechanism work, we explored 202,472 historical content states for 73 articles in Wikipedia, traced the "evolution" processes of article contents, and analyzed the collaborating behaviors of the contributors from the point of content editing tendency. Finally we found that Wikipedia users tend to generalize their own expression of consensus and avoid duplicating contents from outside resource, and during their editing process, the ubiquitous initiative to approach consensus, as well as the neutral deliberation on dissent are two essential factors for collaborative communities like Wikipedia to success.