Do less active participants make active participants more active? An examination of Chinese Wikipedia

Knowledge collaboration in online communities often involves a significant proportion of less active participants who make only scant contributions to their communities. This has become a pervasive characteristic of collaborative work organized through this new form. However, there is ambiguity regarding the role of less active participants in knowledge collaboration in online communities. In this study, we probe the indirect influence of less active participants' contributing behaviors on the quality of knowledge collaboration. We propose the following two-step causal path: 1) less active participants' participation causes active participants to increase contributions and 2) the additional contributions of active participants that result from less active participants' participation substantively improves the quality of knowledge collaboration. Using the edit data of featured articles in the Chinese Wikipedia, we examine the proposed causal path. The main findings of this study are as follows: the productivity of active participants of a Wikipedia article increases when they are triggered by less active participants' editing activities; the additional edits of active participants triggered by less active participants can improve the quality of an article; and less active participants play a major role in reviving the editing work of dormant articles. These findings reveal that less active participants play a substantial role in knowledge collaboration in online communities, as their contributing behaviors sustain collaborative work and eventually improve the quality of outputs.