Type any topic into a search engine. A Wikipedia entry is likely to show up in the results, written by people with an interest in the topic. Wikipedia is the most ubiquitous example of “peer production” websites, which are sites dependent on a community of unpaid content contributors.
Built through the mass aggregation of small contributions, such sites have tremendous potential. But they face daunting challenges as they become more successful.
UW professor Benjamin Mako Hill studies peer production sites, looking at why some succeed while most fail, and how even successful sites struggle to maintain one of their central tenets — being open to new contributors. Hill is a professor of communication in the College of Arts & Sciences.
With grant support from the National Science Foundation, Hill’s research team has examined the lifecycle of peer-production sites, from various Wikipedia editions (there are wikipedias in more than 300 languages) to fandom sites and sites dedicated rock climbing, open-source software, and many other interests. The researchers specifically looked at the lifecycle of content contributions, the lifeblood of any peer-production site. And what they found was puzzling.
A Pattern for Peer Production
Despite their varied sizes and topics, successful peer-production sites tend to have surprisingly similar lifecycles. They begin with a steep rise in content, and then — after five to seven years — experience a gradual decline in new content even as viewership continues to rise.
One might hypothesize that as sites become robust, potential contributors find the easy tasks have already been handled, leading to the decline. Hill has dismissed that theory. In fact, he says, attempts to submit or edit content continue to increase. What changes is the difficulty of the submission process.
“These peer production communities start with the goal of getting people in the door, getting them to contribute content, and their doors are wide open,” Hill says. “Most of these communities never achieve that goal in a meaningful way, but on the off chance that they are successful, over time more people to want to contribute to the site. That’s great, more facts are coming in, but now there’s also a problem, because some people want to screw with the content in various ways. They want to mess things up.”
To read the full article from the May 2025 Perspectives continue here.