Project talk: coordination work and group membership in WikiProjects

WikiProjects have contributed to Wikipedia's success in important ways, yet the range of work that WikiProjects perform and the way they coordinate that work remains largely unexplored. In this study, we perform a content analysis of 788 work-related discussions from the talk pages of 138 WikiProjects in order to understand the role WikiProjects play in collaborative work on Wikipedia. We find that the editors use WikiProjects to coordinate a wide variety of work activities beyond content production and that non-members play an active role in that work. Our research suggests that WikiProject collaboration is less structured and more open than that of many virtual teams and that WikiProjects may function more like FLOSS projects than traditional groups.