Interesting article on research by Stanford students about Wikipedia An interesting article on research by Stanford students about Wikipedia. How is work created, assigned, and completed on large-scale,crowd-powered systems like Wikipedia? And what design principles might enable these federated on line systems to be more effective? This paper reports on a qualitative study of work and task practices on Wikipedia.

Despite the availability of tag-based community-wide task assignment mechanisms, informants reported that self-directed goals, within-topic expertise, and fortuitous discovery are more frequently used than community-tagged tasks.

We examine how Wiki-pedia editors organize their actions and the actions of other participants, and what implications this has for understand-ing, and building tools for, crowd-powered systems, or any web site where the main force of production comes from a crowd of online participants. From these observations and
insights, we developed WikiTasks, a tool that integrates with Wikipedia and supports both grassroots creation of site-wide tasks and self-selection of personal tasks, accepted from this
larger pool of community tasks.

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