Broadband infrastructure is often assumed to reduce informational disparities by expanding access to digital platforms. Yet less is understood about how broadband shapes participation in peer production communities, where knowledge is collectively created and maintained. Using spatial regression models, we examine how broadband coverage influences who contributes and how participation patterns shift in geo-tagged Wikipedia edits across U.S. counties. We find that broadband expansion is strongly associated with increased contributions from local casual and regular editors while reducing reliance on bot-driven activity. However, contributions remain highly concentrated, as prolific editors continue to dominate production. Moreover, we uncover spatial spillover effects, where broadband gains in one county decrease participation in neighboring areas, revealing competitive dynamics in peer production. These findings challenge the assumption that access alone fosters equity, showing that broadband reshapes but does not evenly redistribute editorial influence, with implications for infrastructure policy, platform design, and sustaining inclusive peer production.

The proliferation of OpenStreetMap (OSM) as a collaborative geographic dataset has been instrumental in addressing data gaps globally. However, disparities in map coverage persist, particularly in economically disadvantaged and disaster-prone regions. The emergence of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) in 2010 aimed to bridge these gaps by leveraging the collective efforts of volunteers through platforms like the HOT Tasking Manager. While previous research has highlighted the success of these initiatives in recruiting contributors and expanding map coverage, their implications for existing structural biases remain unclear, potentially hindering the regions benefiting from humanitarian activities. Thus, our study employs the difference-in-difference-in-difference (DDD) approach to empirically examine the pattern between contribution dynamics and population density in project regions involved in humanitarian mapping activities. By further investigating the participation of various levels of contributors in projects with different population densities, we aim to inform better design strategies to align contributor expectations and experiences, fostering more equitable and effective humanitarian mapping efforts.

Peer production systems like OpenStreetMap exhibit persistent information gaps across socioeconomic and population density lines, posing challenges for end users, especially as AI tools such as autonomous vehicles rely on this incomplete data. While prior work has established these trends, their impact on the production of critical semantic metadata remains unclear. In this study, we focus on three OpenStreetMap metadata tags that are essential for supporting road safety. Contrary to the expected socioeconomic and population density trends, our findings reveal that cultural factors play a significant role in influencing tag production. Moreover, we find that automated contributions may hinder human tag production in OpenStreetMap, despite the potential of these automated imports to address data gaps. Overall, our results add nuance to the understanding of the trade-offs involved in automated imports and shed light on how both practitioners and the public can more effectively improve metadata coverage.

Microtasking, the decomposition of tasks into small units of work, is prolific in human computation and crowdsourcing. Some peer production systems are beginning to leverage this same technique in volunteer contribution-based settings. While early research suggests that focusing volunteer work in this way using microtasking may be fruitful, the effects of microtasking on contributor behavior in volunteer peer production settings, like OpenStreetMap, remain unclear. This paper takes advantage of a natural experiment facilitated by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap's Tasking Manager, a microtasking system, and employs causal inference analysis to evaluate the effects of a microtasking intervention on contributor dynamics. Our study systematically leverages a global dataset to analyze peer production dynamics, building on prior research to address a gap in peer production literature and informing the design of the microtasking interfaces. We causally show that, indeed, microtasking can be an effective intervention in peer production settings, but it may exacerbate power-law patterns that are common in such settings. By further analyzing project design decisions and characteristics, we develop implications for platform practitioners, with a focus on addressing engagement and contribution inequity issues prevalent in settings like OpenStreetMap.