Core-Periphery Value Dynamics in Peer Production Community Systems

Abstract

Peer production communities generate much of the world’s sharedknowledge through decentralized collaboration among contributors with varying levels of participation. This study addresses a foundational question: Who provides value in these environments, and what kinds of value do different contributor groups offer? I examine how changes in core and peripheral membership influence knowledge production, and how peer production systems function when either group is diminished or absent. I analyze a natural experiment created by the 2012 split between Wikitravel andWikivoyage, which produced two communities with contrasting contributor structures: one that retained a strong core but a smaller periphery, and another that retained a large periphery but lost most core of its contributors. Using difference-in-differences models applied to article-level data, I compared long-term changes in information production (article length) and polish (structured listing tags). The results show that Wikivoyage experienced faster sustained growth in both information and polish after the split, while Wikitravel grew more slowly despite continued peripheral participation. These findings suggest that core contributors play a central role in coordinating and sustaining long-term knowledge production, while peripheral contributions alone are insufficient to support comparable growth.