Leveraging the contributory potential of user feedback.

Under contribution is an important problem in online social production communities: important tasks don't get done, and only a small minority of participants are active contributors. How can we remedy this situation? We explore the feasibility of using the act of consuming information as a gateway to contributing information; specifically, we investigate semi-automated means to extract useful information from standard types of user feedback. We explore this approach in the context of a geographic wiki and route-planning system for bicyclists. We analyzed naturally occurring textual route feedback, finding that the feedback was rich in information such as bikeability ratings, tags and notes that are useful to improve the system's route finding and navigational assistance capabilities. We also present a technique to extract such information by engaging users in dialogue immediately after they obtain a route. We believe that our results and ideas are applicable to a broad class of social production systems.