I'm Nate!

I'm PhD student at the University of Washington. I'm consulting on some data analysis and research projects at WMF this year.

I belong to the Community Data Science Collective, at the Communication Department at UW and the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. I am training to be a computational social scientist of organizational communication with a focus on online collaboration.

Check out my paper “Revisiting ‘The Rise and Decline’ in a population of Peer Production Projects” For this project, I set out to replicate some of the key findings from “The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System” by Aaron Halfaker, Stuart Geiger, Johnathan Morgan, and John Riedl. They argued that the decline in the number of active Wikipedia editors could be attributed to the rise of quality control systems that made it difficult for newcomers to join the community. I wanted to know if such systems create barriers for newcomers in peer production projects other than Wikipedia. I adapted Halfaker et al.’s methodological approach to analyze a set of 700 Wikia wikis. It turns out that typical wikis not only have similar mechanisms for decline as Wikipedia, but also exhibits ‘rise and decline’ patterns.