Paper ID
3035
Paper Type
full
Description
Social Information Systems (SocIS) enable many people to interact digitally and collaboratively create and share digital content. Nevertheless, the large and heterogenous SocIS communities make it challenging to ensure information quality (IQ) because members’ interpretation and evaluation of content might be very different. As a remedy, many platforms explicitly state normative IQ guidelines. Guidelines can be developed either by the community members themselves or by the platform provider (and imposed on the community). It is unclear, however, which of these two approaches members agree with more strongly and which produces the more satisficatory IQ guidelines. Through an empirical survey study covering 15 different SocIS platforms, we find that members do agree more and are more satisfied when guidelines have been developed by the community. These findings are important for platform providers to improve IQ and retain members, and also inform research on IQ in SocIS.
Recommended Citation
Tilly, Roman; Wintermeyer, Robert; and Posegga, Oliver, "Establishing Information Quality Guidelines in Social Information Systems: Comparison and Discussion of Two Approaches" (2019). ICIS 2019 Proceedings. 30.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2019/crowds_social/crowds_social/30
Establishing Information Quality Guidelines in Social Information Systems: Comparison and Discussion of Two Approaches
Social Information Systems (SocIS) enable many people to interact digitally and collaboratively create and share digital content. Nevertheless, the large and heterogenous SocIS communities make it challenging to ensure information quality (IQ) because members’ interpretation and evaluation of content might be very different. As a remedy, many platforms explicitly state normative IQ guidelines. Guidelines can be developed either by the community members themselves or by the platform provider (and imposed on the community). It is unclear, however, which of these two approaches members agree with more strongly and which produces the more satisficatory IQ guidelines. Through an empirical survey study covering 15 different SocIS platforms, we find that members do agree more and are more satisfied when guidelines have been developed by the community. These findings are important for platform providers to improve IQ and retain members, and also inform research on IQ in SocIS.