Kernkonzepte
Recommender systems can be leveraged to guide editors towards underrepresented topics on peer production platforms without significantly reducing overall engagement.
Zusammenfassung
The article explores the use of recommender systems to address content gaps on peer production platforms like Wikipedia. It presents two empirical studies on the SuggestBot recommender system for Wikipedia.
Study 1 (Observational):
- Analyzed SuggestBot recommendations in 2021 to establish a baseline understanding of how editing behavior is impacted by factors relevant to content gaps.
- Found that editors were more likely to edit biographies of women than biographies of men.
Study 2 (Controlled Experiment):
- Conducted a 3-month controlled experiment on SuggestBot, where a subset of recommendations were replaced with the most relevant articles from underrepresented categories (gender, geography, important topics).
- The alternative recommendations did not suffer from any significant decreases in uptake, and providing a higher number of recommendations from underrepresented categories substantially increased the share of recommendation-prompted editing on those articles.
The article discusses how recommender systems that rely solely on edit history can inadvertently magnify self-focus bias, as the article discovery process also plays a key role in determining what content editors are likely to engage with. It suggests that incorporating content equity considerations into recommender systems can help address content gaps on peer production platforms without significantly reducing overall engagement.
Statistiken
"Presenting editors with a greater share of female recommendations—41.7% female recommendations, instead of 22.3% and 23.0% in 2020 and 2021—also resulted in a greater share of editing being done on female biographies as compared with male biographies."
"29.3% of edited recommendations pertained to the global south, compared with 22.0% in 2020 and 22.3% in 2021."
"11.4% of edited recommendations in our study period pertained to important topics. This was, again, higher than the two previous years—7.2% in 2020 and 7.5% in 2021."
Zitate
"On one hand, I'm surprised it [Menstruation article] isn't here, but then as one of the x-deficient 90% of editors, I wouldn't have even thought to add it."