Dedication in Online Collaboration Redeems Experience: An Analysis on the Comparison between Wikipedia and Scholarpedia

Evaluation and performance analysis of an online collaborative project are never easy tasks because the massive human involvement and other qualitative factors are hard to assess. To figure out the relationship between human related factors and quality of collaboration outcomes, we propose an effective formal approach to estimate the human involvement in collaboration process and testify our method on 100 articles extracted from Wikipedia and Scholar pedia, the qualities of whose historical contents have been evaluated manually by volunteers of specific background. Through comparison of the human involvement and the outcome quality in these two projects, we find that the quality of collaborative products is positively related with the number, dedication and experience of collaboration participants, among which experience decides the necessary amount of human resources for a high quality, and increasing number or dedication of participants can also make up to the lack of experiences.