An understanding of participation dynamics within online production communities requires an examination of the roles assumed by participants. Recent studies have established that the organizational structure of such communities is not flat; rather, participants can take on a variety of well-defined functional roles. What is the nature of functional roles? How have they evolved? And how do participants assume these functions? Prior studies focused primarily on participants' activities, rather than functional roles. Further, extant conceptualizations of role transitions in production communities, such as the Reader to Leader framework, emphasize a single dimension: organizational power, overlooking distinctions between functions. In contrast, in this paper we empirically study the nature and structure of functional roles within Wikipedia, seeking to validate existing theoretical frameworks. The analysis sheds new light on the nature of functional roles, revealing the intricate "career paths" resulting from participants' role transitions.

In Wikipedia, volunteers collaboratively author encyclopedic entries, and therefore managing conflict is a key factor in group success. Behavioral research describes 3 conflict types: task‐related, affective, and process. Affective and process conflicts have been consistently found to impede group performance; however, the effect of task conflict is inconsistent. We propose that these inconclusive results are due to underspecification of the task conflict construct, and focus on the transition phase where task‐related disagreements escalate into affective and process conflict. We define these transitional phases as distinct constructs—task‐affective and task‐process conflict—and develop a theoretical model that explains how the various task‐related conflict constructs, together with the composition of the wiki editor group, determine the quality of the collaboratively authored wiki article. Our empirical study of 96 Wikipedia articles involved multiple data‐collection methods, including analysis of Wikipedia system logs, manual content analysis of articles' discussion pages, and a comprehensive assessment of articles' quality using theDelphi method. Our results show that when group members' disagreements—originally task related—escalate into personal attacks or hinge on procedure, these disagreements impede group performance. Implications for research and practice are discussed.