Abstract
BackgroundDespite the undisputed role of emotions in teamwork, not much is known about the make-up of emotions in online collaboration. Publicly available repositories of collaboration data, such as Wikipedia editor discussions, now enable the large-scale study of affect and dialogue in peer production.MethodsWe investigate the established Wikipedia community and focus on how emotion and dialogue differ depending on the status, gender, and the communication network of the editors who have written at least 100 comments on the English Wikipedia's article talk pages. Emotions are quantified using a word-based approach comparing the results of two predefined lexicon-based methods: LIWC and SentiStrength.Principal FindingsWe find that administrators maintain a rather neutral, impersonal tone, while regular editors are more emotional and relationship-oriented, that is, they use language to form and maintain connections to other editors. A persistent gender difference is that female contributors communicate in a manner that promotes social affiliation and emotional connection more than male editors, irrespective of their status in the community. Female regular editors are the most relationship-oriented, whereas male administrators are the least relationship-focused. Finally, emotional and linguistic homophily is prevalent: editors tend to interact with other editors having similar emotional styles (e.g., editors expressing more anger connect more with one another).Conclusions/SignificanceEmotional expression and linguistic style in online collaboration differ substantially depending on the contributors' gender and status, and on the communication network. This should be taken into account when analyzing collaborative success, and may prove insightful to communities facing gender gap and stagnation in contributor acquisition and participation levels.
Highlights
Emotions are the glue of human societies [1] and their significant influence on human behavior is undisputed
Since most variables are not normally distributed despite the large sample size, we examine the Examples worried, fearful, nervous hate, kill, annoyed crying, grief, sad maybe, perhaps, guess always, never blah, you know went, ran, had is, does, hear will, gonna mate, talk, child differences between Wikipedia editor groups by computing twotailed Mann-Whitney U-tests which have a greater efficiency than t-tests on non-normal distributions
While we do not repeat the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) results presented in [20], we frequently address them as a means of cross-validation
Summary
Emotions are the glue of human societies [1] (cf. [2], p.27) and their significant influence on human behavior is undisputed. The conversations in the Wikipedia discussion pages are especially valuable These pages represent arenas of cooperation and conflict between users (to whom we will refer to as editors on) with the goal of improving encyclopedic content. Considering the thousands of failed online collaboration efforts [14], its size and success are quite miraculous. This noteworthy performance has motivated a flurry of research activity [15] on topics ranging from leadership behaviors to motivations to contribute. Editors frequently discuss changes to articles on article talk pages, while user talk pages (‘‘personal’’ pages) resemble a personal wall and function as a public mail inbox [17]. In light of the different emphasis of Wikipedia talk pages, our research sheds light on how this translates into individual patterns of emotion and communication
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