Abstract
The existence of a shared classification system is essential to knowledge production, transfer, and sharing. Studies of knowledge classification, however, rarely consider the fact that knowledge categories exist within hierarchical information systems designed to facilitate knowledge search and discovery. This neglect is problematic whenever information about categorical membership is itself used to evaluate the quality of the items that the category contains. The main objective of this paper is to show that the effects of category membership depend on the position that a category occupies in the hierarchical knowledge classification system of Wikipedia—an open knowledge production and sharing platform taking the form of a freely accessible on-line encyclopedia. Using data on all English-language Wikipedia articles, we examine how the position that a category occupies in the classification hierarchy affects the attention that articles in that category attract from Wikipedia editors, and their evaluation of quality of the Wikipedia articles. Specifically, we show that Wikipedia articles assigned to coarse-grained categories (i. e., categories that occupy higher positions in the hierarchical knowledge classification system) garner more attention from Wikipedia editors (i. e., attract a higher volume of text editing activity), but receive lower evaluations (i. e., they are considered to be of lower quality). The negative relation between attention and quality implied by this result is consistent with current theories of social categorization, but it also goes beyond available results by showing that the effects of categorization on evaluation depend on the position that a category occupies in a hierarchical knowledge classification system.
Highlights
Social categories give order to past experiences and shape expectations about the future
We show that the granularity of a category affects the probability that articles in that category will be included in the restricted set of high quality Wikipedia articles, called featured articles
In a further robustness check, we weaken the criterion for being a high-quality article to those being featured or good articles, the shape of the relation between granularity and quality is nearly indistinguishable compared to that shown in Fig 1, where we considered only featured article (FA) as high-quality articles
Summary
Social categories give order to past experiences and shape expectations about the future. Categories matter because they provide labels that are used to define the identity of objects [1, 2], and adjust individual behavior to social situations—a view widely shared across studies of products, individuals, and institutions [3,4,5]. Categories matter because the aggregate information they convey helps to predict features of individual items they contain [6]. Categorization drives a number of day-to-day decisions such as, for example, what restaurant to try, what movie to watch, or what stock to buy [7,8,9].
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