Study On The Credibility Assessment Of Open Collaborative Content Creation Activity

As wiki-based mass collaborative creation and open collaborative communities have been popularized in the new generation of Web, open content is not only widely welcomed in social media, but also attracts attention of the academic communities. Open content for non-software such as Wikipedia is the hot research field in the domain of information system and information science in recent years, yet the debate about its content quality and credibility has never stopped. Traditional wiki-based systems support open collaboration, but don’t focus on individual contribution and lack of obvious mechanism of credibility assessment and trust management. Variety of users and quick update of content make the problem of credibility in open collaboration fairly complicated.Activities of open collaborative content creation in this dissertation are referred to a new type of collaborative information behavior of users and way of content production. Meanwhile, open content in the dissertation focuses on open collaboration conforming to free documentation license, allowing revision, derivation and distribution of works by any contributors. Our research object will focus on factual works especially for textile collaborative content based on external references, such as open encyclopedia projects like Wikipedia and Baidu.After reviewing present studies, we put forward the following research problems. Firstly, how are the mechanisms in activities of collaborative content creation and collaborative communities? Secondly, how to improve information quality and credibility of open content from both production and consumption perspectives? Thirdly, how to improve the efficiency of assessment activities of open content credibility?Our research starts from the outstanding problems of trust and credibility in the process of open collaborative content creation, aims at the activity system of open collaborative content creation as main study object and focuses on its credibility as main study content. Meanwhile the study systematically and deeply explores the credibility problems of open collaborative content creation. Four parts constitute the dissertation:(1) Framework of theoretic analysis:research on activity system of open collaborative content creation. We use the research framework and analyzing method of activity theory to construct the activity model and analyze its components, subsystems and activity structure; Define and describe three core components such as subject, object and community, three mediators of tools, rules and roles, and four subsystems of creation, consumption, collaboration and communication; Decompose activity process into four stages of consumption, creation, feedback and collaboration, conflicts and coordination, then go into structure characters of each stage; Describe the users’ role differentiation phenomenon in evolving process of community.(2) Perspective of content creation:subject-oriented research on trust evaluation. We explore effective models of trust assessment and management; Parse trust relationship of virtual community and construction of modes from the perspective of content creation; Put forward an extensive definition of trust and induce properties of network trust; Study and devise an extraction method of indirect feedback information based on the revision history, further deduce computation models of subject trust assessment, meanwhile implement the arithmetic process and model using Java development tool; Analyze the significance of the method based on the output results of the program.(3) Perspective of content consumption:object-oriented research on credibility assessment. We use survey method to explore the main influence factors of credibility assessment and the difference of assessment awareness and behavior in groups differing in the degree of collaboration and participation; Conclude from analyzing survey results of two groups and put forward research hypotheses, then construct positive model of open content credibility; Devise and implement experimental study to test hypotheses; Analyze the results and provide indication of future study and practice.(4) Perspective of both content creation and consumption:improvement research on the effectiveness of content credibility assessment activities. From three aspects of assessment process, inspiration of verification behavior, and interactive design of technology system based on user trust experience, the study goes into the way of improving effectiveness of credibility assessment, in order to enhance users trust experience in open collaborative communities and further improve the content credibility and sustainable development of open collaborative communities.Main research conclusions as follows:(1) We argue that the analyzing framework of activity theory can integrate present studies of mass collaboration and provide unifying descriptive framework and conceptual modes. Activity system model includes six components and four subsystems; collaborative activity process includes four stages; feedback and collaboration is the soul of mass collaborative activity.(2) From perspective of content creation, subject-oriented trust assessment studies help to improve the transparency of collaborative activity and credibility of collaborative content. Our studies construct arithmetic to extract indirect feedback information based on the evolving chain of content fragments, and argue that this arithmetic can be applied to the construction of trust assessment model between subjects and reputation evaluation in collaborative community.(3) From perspective of content consumption, user attributes (trust tendency, verification behavior, degree of collaborative participation) and content clues (degree of collaboration, reputation of collaborative contributors, quality of references) are main influential factors of credibility assessment. As to assessment awareness, users of higher degree of collaborative participation are significantly stronger than of lower degree. As to assessment ability, users of lower degree of collaborative participation are inclined to dispersive and sensible assessment criterion, while users of higher degree are inclined to centralize and rationale assessment criterion. Most users agree that verification behavior and clue of reference impact credibility assessment. Information stimulus based on content clues significantly impact perceived credibility of users.(4) From perspective of both creation and consumption, we argue that something must be done to improve the effectiveness of credibility assessment activity and enhance users trust experience in collaborative community in order to improve information quality and credibility of open content.Main innovation as follows:(1) The study starts from dual perspectives of content creation and consumption using amalgamation of technological paradigm in trust studies and behavioral paradigm in user studies, and systematically and deeply goes into the credibility problem of open collaborative activity. In technological paradigm, it put forward a new assessment scheme constructed on feedback and collaboration as well as new arithmetic of extracting indirect feedback information, based on which it put forward the measurement of users’ contribution and deductive method of trust degree; In behavioral paradigm, it constructs credibility assessment model of open content using multiple methods such as survey, content analysis, experimental study and interview, then parse the indication and significance of the model.(2) The study constructs a unifying theoretic framework for analyzing activities of open collaborative content creation. It regards collaborative communities as an activity system on activity theoretic basis and elaborates collaborative problems of open communities in the framework.Insufficiencies as follows:(1) Some hypotheses in the open content credibility model need to be confirmed through further practice studies such as whether community genre, verification behavior, or degree of users’ familiarity to content affects perceived credibility. Experimental study in this dissertation is confined to the survey objects and explanation of the results is limited to ordinary network users whose degree of participation is lower. Further studies will extend experimental objects in order to make the model more explicable and precise;(2) the study in this dissertation has not put forward any way to extract feedback information from discussion or vote in the situation of assessing trust degree between subjects of wiki-based communities. Moreover, method of extracting indirect feedback information from revision history also needs to be refined;(3) the dissertation put forward only guidelines to devise the interactive situation of communities. We are going to go into concrete constructing methods for different types and forms of collaborative communities.This research is financially supported by Social Science Foundation of Education Ministry and one of the achievements of the foundation-supported project entitled "Trust management mechanism for collaborative creation and content sharing in virtual communities"(NO.10YJC870048).