Knowledge categorization affects popularity and quality of Wikipedia articles

The existence of a shared classification system is essential to knowledge production, transfer, and sharing. Studies of knowledge classification, however, rarely consider the fact that knowledge categories exist within hierarchical information systems designed to facilitate knowledge search and discovery. This neglect is problematic whenever information about categorical membership is itself used to evaluate the quality of the items that the category contains. The main objective of this paper is to show that the effects of category membership depend on the position that a category occupies in the hierarchical knowledge classification system of Wikipedia—an open knowledge production and sharing platform taking the form of a freely accessible on-line encyclopedia. Using data on all English-language Wikipedia articles, we examine how the position that a category occupies in the classification hierarchy affects the attention that articles in that category attract from Wikipedia editors, and their evaluation of quality of the Wikipedia articles. Specifically, we show that Wikipedia articles assigned to coarse-grained categories (i. e., categories that occupy higher positions in the hierarchical knowledge classification system) garner more attention from Wikipedia editors (i. e., attract a higher volume of text editing activity), but receive lower evaluations (i. e., they are considered to be of lower quality). The negative relation between attention and quality implied by this result is consistent with current theories of social categorization, but it also goes beyond available results by showing that the effects of categorization on evaluation depend on the position that a category occupies in a hierarchical knowledge classification system.

共享分类体系对于知识的生产、传播与共享至关重要。然而，现有知识分类研究极少关注到这样一个事实：知识类别本身存在于旨在助力知识检索与发现的层级化信息系统之中。当类别归属信息本身被用于评估该类别所包含条目的质量时，这种研究疏忽便会引发问题。
本研究的主要目的在于证明，类别归属的影响取决于该类别在维基百科（Wikipedia）的层级化知识分类体系中的位置——维基百科是一个以免费开放在线百科全书形式存在的开放式知识生产与共享平台。本研究依托全部英文维基百科条目数据，考察了类别在分类层级中的位置如何影响该类别下条目所获得的维基百科编辑者关注度，以及编辑者对这些条目的质量评估。
具体而言，研究发现，被划归至粗粒度类别（即层级化知识分类体系中位置更靠上的类别）的维基百科条目，会获得更多维基百科编辑者的关注（即产生更高频次的文本编辑活动），但却获得更低的质量评估（即被认为质量较低）。这一结果所揭示的关注度与质量间的负相关关系，与当前的社会分类理论相符，同时还进一步拓展了现有研究成果：它证明了分类对评估的影响，取决于类别在层级化知识分类体系中的位置。