Content Growth and Attention Contagion in Information Networks: Addressing Information Poverty on Wikipedia
Authors: Zhu, Kai; Walker, Dylan; Muchnik, Lev
Journal: Information Systems Research (2020)
<jats:p> Open collaboration platforms have fundamentally changed the way that knowledge is produced, disseminated, and consumed. Although the community governance and open collaboration model of Wikipedia confers many benefits, its decentralized nature can leave questions of information poverty and skewness to the mercy of the system's natural dynamics. In this paper, we leverage a large-scale natural experiment to gain a causal understanding of how exogenous content contributions to Wikipedia articles affect the attention that they attract and how that attention spills over to other articles in the information network. We find a positive feedback loop: content contribution leads to significant and long-lasting increases of attention and future contribution. Unfortunately, this also suggests that impoverished regions of information networks are likely to remain so in the absence of intervention. However, our analysis reveals a potential solution. Articles in impoverished regions of information networks are particularly positioned to benefit from the phenomenon of attention spillovers. Using a simulation that is calibrated with real-world link traffic of the Wikipedia network, we s…