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Linguistic Similarity Within Centralized FLOSS Development

Matthew Gaughan, Aaron Shaw, Darren Gergle

Abstract

When free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) stewards centralize project development, they potentially undermine project sustainability and impact how contributors talk to each other. To study the relationship between steward-centralized development and contributor discussion, we compared the development of three Wikimedia platform features that the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) built in MediaWiki. In a mixed-methods multi-case comparison, we used repository mining, linguistic style features, and principal component analysis to track MediaWiki feature development and issue discussions. Contrary to both our intuition and prior work, there were no identifiable differences in the linguistic style of WMF-affiliates and external contributors, even when feature development was guided by WMF contributions. From these results, we offer two provocations to the study of collaborative FLOSS development: (1) stewards dominate development according to their own use of specific project functionality; (2) centralized project development does not entail hierarchical language within project discussions.

Linguistic Similarity Within Centralized FLOSS Development

Abstract

When free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) stewards centralize project development, they potentially undermine project sustainability and impact how contributors talk to each other. To study the relationship between steward-centralized development and contributor discussion, we compared the development of three Wikimedia platform features that the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) built in MediaWiki. In a mixed-methods multi-case comparison, we used repository mining, linguistic style features, and principal component analysis to track MediaWiki feature development and issue discussions. Contrary to both our intuition and prior work, there were no identifiable differences in the linguistic style of WMF-affiliates and external contributors, even when feature development was guided by WMF contributions. From these results, we offer two provocations to the study of collaborative FLOSS development: (1) stewards dominate development according to their own use of specific project functionality; (2) centralized project development does not entail hierarchical language within project discussions.
Paper Structure (14 sections, 2 figures)

This paper contains 14 sections, 2 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Study Design
  4. Case Selection
  5. Data Collection
  6. Phabricator Collection
  7. Commit Data
  8. Modeling Communication
  9. Linguistic Style
  10. Conversational Registers
  11. Results
  12. Discussion
  13. Limitations
  14. Conclusion

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Weekly count of commits by contributor affiliation for the duration of VisualEditor's Wikimedia deployment. Faceted by repository, we can see that at the same time that WMF-affiliates author the vast majority of commits to extensions/visualeditor, they author the minority of commits to mediawiki/core.
  • Figure 2: Affiliation-attributed Phabricator comments (requests) plotted along PC3 and PC4 of a PCA on BiberPlus features. All comments are clustered similarly, indicating no difference between authors' organizational affiliation and linguistic register.