Linguistic Similarity Within Centralized FLOSS Development

TL;DR

This study investigates how centralized stewardship in FLOSS projects influences contributor communication, finding no significant linguistic differences between steward and external contributors despite centralized development efforts.

Contribution

It provides a novel mixed-methods analysis showing that centralized stewardship does not lead to hierarchical language differences in FLOSS discussions.

Findings

No linguistic style differences between WMF-affiliated and external contributors.

Steward influence aligns with specific project functionality use.

Centralized development does not create hierarchical language patterns.

Abstract

When free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) stewards centralize project development, they potentially undermine project sustainability and impact how contributors talk to each other. To study the relationship between steward-centralized development and contributor discussion, we compared the development of three Wikimedia platform features that the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) built in MediaWiki. In a mixed-methods multi-case comparison, we used repository mining, linguistic style features, and principal component analysis to track MediaWiki feature development and issue discussions. Contrary to both our intuition and prior work, there were no identifiable differences in the linguistic style of WMF-affiliates and external contributors, even when feature development was guided by WMF contributions. From these results, we offer two provocations to the study of collaborative FLOSS development: (1) stewards dominate development according to their own use of specific project functionality; (2) centralized project development does not entail hierarchical language within project discussions.