Unlike traditional firms, open collaborative systems rely on volunteers to operate, and many communities struggle to maintain enough contributors to ensure the quality and quantity of content. However, Wikipedia has historically faced the exact opposite problem: too much participation, particularly from users who, knowingly or not, do not share the same norms as veteran Wikipedians. During its period of exponential growth, the Wikipedian community developed specialized socio technical defense mechanisms to protect itself from the negatives of massive participation: spam, vandalism, falsehoods, and other damage. Yet recently, Wikipedia has faced a number of high profile issues with recruiting and retaining new contributors.
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