Doctoral Dissertation Research: Group Diversity and Knowledge Production

Arnout van de RijtMichael A RstivoSUNY石溪妇女？S历史上缺席科学工作和其他创造知识的机构，也可以在当代的在线同行生产实践中看到。最近对维基百科贡献者的调查研究发现，只有不到15%的贡献者是女性。维基百科是同行创造知识的一个突出例子。造成这种高度性别不平等的原因既与自我选择有关，也与参与障碍有关：创造知识的专业知识被认为是一种男性追求，女性可能会相信这一信念，削弱她们参与在线知识生产的信心。然而，这种性别差异已经被证明不仅仅是自我选择：研究表明，在线参与文化的某些方面限制了女性的参与--S因过度冲突或争执而参与，某些话题或观点被贬低，在某些情况下，公开的敌意或其他形式的歧视。研究人员将分析性别多样性如何影响维基百科贡献者的工作质量。他们将使用维基百科百科全书文章中信息的质量作为衡量这些文章作者群体表现的指标。组织研究早就知道，多样性--关于团队组成、正在执行的任务类型和其他团队动态--会影响团队的表现，并塑造其集体产出。例如，维基百科贡献者的工作质量因小组成员的功能多样性(所扮演的工作类型的差异)和认知多样性(知识库的差异)而有所不同。然而，与性别的潜在互动没有得到任何详细的探讨，这是令人惊讶的，因为对在线交流和互动中的性别差异的研究表明，需要将性别更彻底地纳入我们对问题的概念化。更广泛的影响研究维基百科贡献者的工作提供了一个宝贵的机会，来评估性别多样性和不同的性别行为方式如何影响群体表现，并塑造同行产生的知识的质量。对维基百科文章子集的初步分析表明，性别多样性会带来有利于文章质量的结果。这项研究的发现将会引起性别学者、组织研究人员和其他研究在线协作的人的兴趣。更广泛地说，了解多样性为什么以及何时会对群体有益，对于在这些类型的在线组织中建立和工作的人来说，将具有实际意义。特别是，维基百科可以采取措施，通过确定和解决来自不同贡献者的包容性参与的障碍来缩小性别差距。

Arnout van de RijtMichael A RestivoSUNY Stony BrookWomen?s historical absences from scientific endeavors and other institutions that create knowledge are also seen in the contemporary practice of online peer production. Recent survey research of contributors to Wikipedia, a prominent example of peer produced knowledge, has found that less than 15 percent of its contributors are women. The causes for this high degree of gender inequality have been linked to both self-selection and barriers to participation: expertise in creating knowledge is considered a masculine pursuit, and women may buy into this belief, undermining their confidence in participating in online knowledge production. However, this gender gap has been shown to be more than simply self-selection: research suggests that some aspects of online participatory culture serve to limit women?s participation due to excessive conflict or contentiousness, devaluation of certain topics or perspectives, and in some instances, overt hostility or other forms of misogyny.The researchers will analyze the ways in which gender diversity affects the quality of work produced by contributors to Wikipedia. They will use the quality of the information in Wikipedia's encyclopedia articles as an indicator of the performance of the groups who author those articles. Organizational research has long known that diversity -- in respect to group composition, the types of tasks being performed, and other group dynamics -- affects a group's performance and shapes its collective output. For example, the quality of work produced by Wikipedia contributors has been shown to vary by the functional diversity (differences in types of work roles performed) and cognitive diversity (differences in the knowledge bases) of group members. However, the potential interaction with gender not been explored in any detail, which is surprising since research on gender differences in online communication and interaction point to the need to incorporate gender more thoroughly into our conceptualization of the problem. Broader ImpactsStudying the work of Wikipedia contributors provides an invaluable opportunity to assess how gender diversity, and the different ways of doing gender, affects group performance and shapes the quality of peer produced knowledge. Preliminary analysis of a subset of Wikipedia articles shows that gender diversity leads to favorable outcomes for article quality. The findings from this research will be of interest to gender scholars, organizational researchers, and others who study of online collaboration. More broadly, understanding why and when diversity can be beneficial to groups will be of practical relevance to the people who are building and working within these types of online organizations. Particularly, Wikipedia can take steps to shrink its gender gap by identifying and addressing barriers to inclusive participation from a diverse range of contributors.