IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamist/v64y2013i8p1634-1648.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Stay on the Wikipedia task: When task‐related disagreements slip into personal and procedural conflicts

Author

Listed:
  • Ofer Arazy
  • Lisa Yeo
  • Oded Nov

Abstract

In Wikipedia, volunteers collaboratively author encyclopedic entries, and therefore managing conflict is a key factor in group success. Behavioral research describes 3 conflict types: task‐related, affective, and process. Affective and process conflicts have been consistently found to impede group performance; however, the effect of task conflict is inconsistent. We propose that these inconclusive results are due to underspecification of the task conflict construct, and focus on the transition phase where task‐related disagreements escalate into affective and process conflict. We define these transitional phases as distinct constructs—task‐affective and task‐process conflict—and develop a theoretical model that explains how the various task‐related conflict constructs, together with the composition of the wiki editor group, determine the quality of the collaboratively authored wiki article. Our empirical study of 96 Wikipedia articles involved multiple data‐collection methods, including analysis of Wikipedia system logs, manual content analysis of articles' discussion pages, and a comprehensive assessment of articles' quality using the Delphi method. Our results show that when group members' disagreements—originally task related—escalate into personal attacks or hinge on procedure, these disagreements impede group performance. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Ofer Arazy & Lisa Yeo & Oded Nov, 2013. "Stay on the Wikipedia task: When task‐related disagreements slip into personal and procedural conflicts," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(8), pages 1634-1648, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:64:y:2013:i:8:p:1634-1648
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.22869
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22869
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.22869?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ofer Arazy & Johannes Daxenberger & Hila Lifshitz-Assaf & Oded Nov & Iryna Gurevych, 2016. "Turbulent Stability of Emergent Roles: The Dualistic Nature of Self-Organizing Knowledge Coproduction," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 27(4), pages 792-812, December.
    2. Wang, Nan & Sun, Yongqiang & Shen, Xiao-Liang & Zhang, Xi, 2018. "A value-justice model of knowledge integration in wikis: The moderating role of knowledge equivocality," International Journal of Information Management, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 64-75.
    3. Jiangnan Qiu & Min Zuo & Jingxian Wang & Chengjie Cai, 2021. "Knowledge order in an online knowledge community: Group heterogeneity and two paths mediated by group interaction," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(8), pages 1075-1091, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:64:y:2013:i:8:p:1634-1648. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.