Survey on governance of user-generated content in web communities.

ABSTRACTWeb communities court for the users' favor. Maintaining a high quality of the user-generated content is a foundation of a healthy and flourishing community. In order to maintain this quality, the community platform needs governance. Governance of a web community can be understood as steering and coordinating the activities of community members. This includes viewing and reviewing of already existing content but also limitations for creating and sharing new content. In this paper, we systematically review successful web communities for creating and sharing user-generated content. To this end, we have grouped the communities into the following four categories: Social Media, News, Social Reviewing, and Social Networking, we have chosen the five most prominent web platforms from Alexa Page Rank. For our survey of these platforms, we have analyzed the functionality they offer for governing the user-generated content. The result is a description of best practices for governance of user-generated content in different categories of web communities.