Diversity of editors and teams versus quality of cooperative work: experiments on wikipedia

We study whether and how the diversity of editors and teams affects the quality of work in a virtual cooperative work environment on the Wikipedia example. We propose a measure of interests diversity of an editor and some measures of team diversity in terms of members’ interests and experience. Statistical and machine learning methods are used to investigate the dependency between diversity and work quality. The presented experimental results confirm our hypothesis that interest diversity of a single editors and team diversity are positively related to the quality of their work. Interestingly, some of our experiments also indicate that diversity may be more important than such attributes as productivity of an editor or size or experience of the team. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to predict work quality based on diversity which is an additional statistical signal that diversity is correlated with work quality.