A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Competitive Editing in Wikipedia: Contributors' Effort to Influence Articles and the Community's Attempt to Ensure Neutrality

TL;DR

This paper models the competitive editing dynamics in Wikipedia using game theory, showing how individual efforts and community mechanisms influence article ownership and neutrality, supported by empirical analysis of extensive contributor data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-level game-theoretic model of Wikipedia editing, linking contributor effort, ownership, and neutrality, validated by large-scale empirical data.

Findings

Large edits by creators often lead to loss of ownership to curators.

Neutrality mechanisms prevent ownership concentration among few contributors.

Excessive governance may discourage contributor participation.

Abstract

Peer production, such as the collaborative authoring of Wikipedia articles, involves both cooperation and competition between contributors, and we focus on the latter. As individuals, contributors compete to align Wikipedia articles with their personal perspectives. As a community, they work collectively to ensure a neutral point of view (NPOV). We study the interplay between individuals' competition and the community's endeavor to ensure neutrality. We develop a two-level game-theoretic model, modeling the interactions of ownership-motivated individuals and neutrality-seeking communal mechanisms as a Stackelberg game. We present our model's predictions regarding the relation between contributors' effort (i.e. typical size of edit) and benefits (i.e. the portion of the article they eventually ``own''). We validate the model's prediction through an empirical analysis, by studying the interactions of 219,811 distinct contributors that co-produced 864 Wikipedia articles over a decade. The analysis and empirical results suggest that contributors who make large edits (``creators'') eventually lose the article's ownership to those who refine the articles and typically make smaller edits (``curators''). Whereas neutrality-seeking mechanisms are essential for ensuring that ownership is not concentrated within a small number of contributors, our findings suggest that the burden of excessive governance may deter contributors from participating.