Coordinating tasks on the commons: designing for personal goals, expertise and serendipity

How is work created, assigned, and completed on large-scale, crowd-powered systems like Wikipedia? And what design principles might enable these federated online 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, withintopic expertise, and fortuitous discovery are more frequently used than community-tagged tasks. We examine how Wikipedia editors organize their actions and the actions of other participants, and what implications this has for understanding, 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 ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Michel Krieger, Emily Margarete Stark, Scott R. Klemmer
• Keywords: CHI 2009, Crowd-powered Systems, Federated Online Systems, Human Computer Interaction, Tag-based Community-wide Task