Doctoral Dissertation Research: Group Diversity and Knowledge Production

Arnout van de RijtMichael A restivony Stony BrookWomen？科学努力和其他创造知识的机构在历史上的缺失也体现在当代在线对等生产的实践中。维基百科是同行产生知识的一个突出例子，最近对维基百科贡献者的调查研究发现，不到15%的贡献者是女性。造成这种高度性别不平等的原因与自我选择和参与障碍有关：创造知识的专业知识被认为是男性的追求，女性可能会接受这种信念，从而削弱了她们参与在线知识生产的信心。然而，这种性别差异已被证明不仅仅是自我选择：研究表明，在线参与性文化的某些方面限制了女性的参与。由于过度的冲突或争论，对某些话题或观点的贬低，以及在某些情况下，公开的敌意或其他形式的厌女症而参与。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的信息质量作为撰写这些文章的小组表现的指标。组织研究早就知道，多样性——在群体构成、执行任务的类型和其他群体动态方面——会影响一个群体的表现，并塑造其集体产出。例如，维基百科贡献者的工作质量因团队成员的功能多样性（工作角色类型的差异）和认知多样性（知识基础的差异）而异。然而，与性别的潜在互动并没有被详细探讨，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中。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，以及不同的性别处理方式，如何影响群体表现和塑造同伴生产知识的质量。对维基百科文章子集的初步分析表明，性别多样性导致文章质量的有利结果。这项研究的结果将引起性别学者、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，理解多样性为何以及何时对群体有益，将对正在建立和在这些类型的在线组织中工作的人具有实际意义。特别是，维基百科可以采取措施，通过识别和解决各种贡献者包容性参与的障碍，缩小其性别差距。

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.