Ideology and Composition Among an Online Crowd: Evidence from Wikipedians
研究分析维基百科编辑者在美国政治相关文章中的行为，发现群体观点趋于温和的主要原因是参与者构成变化（占80%-90%），而非个人观点改变，这对在线社区管理有启示。
Online communities bring together participants from diverse backgrounds and often face challenges in aggregating their opinions. We infer lessons from the experience of individual contributors to Wikipedia articles about U.S. politics. We identify two factors that cause a tendency toward moderation in collective opinion: Either biased contributors contribute less, which shifts the composition of participants, or biased contributors moderate their own views. Our findings show that shifts in the composition of participants account for 80%–90% of the moderation in content. Contributors tend to contribute to articles with slants that are opposite their own views. Evidence suggests that encountering extreme contributors with an opposite slant plays an important role in triggering the composition shift and changing views. These findings suggest that collective intelligence becomes more trustworthy when mechanisms encourage confrontation between distinct viewpoints. They also suggest, cautiously, that managers who aspire to produce content “from all sides” should let the most biased contributors leave the collective conversation if they can be replaced with more moderate voices. This paper was accepted by Anandhi Bharadwaj, information systems.