Codification and Collaboration: Information Quality in Social Media

This paper argues that social media combines the codification and collaboration features of earlier generations of knowledge management systems. This combination potentially changes the way knowledge is created, potentially requiring new theories and methods for understanding these processes. We forward the specialized social network method of two-mode networks as one such approach. We examine the information quality of 16,244 articles built through 2,677,397 revisions by 147,362 distinct contributors to Wikipedia’s Medicine Wikiproject. We find that the structure of the contributor-artifact network is associated with information quality in these networks. Our findings have implications for managers seeking to cultivate effective knowledge creation environments using social media and to identify valuable knowledge created external to the firm.

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