The Social Actions of Successful Groups

The success of a group is determined by a number of factors. Some of these factors, such as task difficulty and availability of resources, are out of a group´s control and are constant amongst competing teams working on the same task. One factor which is not constant is the social dynamics of the group. The mix of behaviors by individuals in the group, as seen through social relations, social actions, and social roles are key in determining a group´s success. In this paper, we examine if it is possible to determine the success, or status, of a Wikipedia article through the social dynamics of the associated discussions. We capture social dynamics using four higher level social phenomena and fourteen lower level social acts, which we define from prevailing theories of group success. We examine discussions around English and Chinese Wikipedia articles and find that using social acts can increase prediction over standard network metric approaches by 35.0% for English to 90.3% and 12.3% for Chinese to 88.7%.