Reciprocity and reputation motivate contributions to Wikipedia; indigenous knowledge and “cultural imperialism”; how PR people see Wikipedia
- 1 What drives people to contribute to Wikipedia? Experiment suggests reciprocity and social image motivations
- 2 Does “cultural imperialism” prevent the incorporation of indigenous knowledge on Wikipedia?
- 3 How PR professionals see Wikipedia: Trends from second US survey
- 4 Report from the inaugural L2 Wiki Research Hackathon
- 5 Briefly
- 5.1 “Iron Law of Oligarchy” (1911) confirmed on Wikia wikis
- 5.2 Twitter activity leads Wikipedia activity by an hour
- 5.3 “Google loves Wikipedia”
- 5.4 New article assessment algorithm scores quality of editors, too
- 5.5 “How do metrics of link analysis correlate to quality, relevance and popularity in Wikipedia?”
- 5.6 Usage of images and sounds is related to the quality of Wikipedia articles
- 5.7 Student perception of Wikipedia’s credibility is significantly influenced by their professors’ opinion
- 5.8 Non-participation of female students on Wikipedia influenced by school, peers and lack of community awareness
- 5.9 Gender gap coverage in media and blogs
- 5.10 German Wikipedia articles become static while English ones continue to develop
- 5.11 New sockpuppet corpus
- 5.12 Workshop on “User behavior and content generation on Wikipedia”
- 6 References
Wikipedia works on the efforts of unpaid volunteers who choose to donate their time to advance the cause of free knowledge. This phenomenon, as trivial as it may sound to those acquainted with Wikipedia inner workings, has always puzzled economists and social scientists alike, in that standard Economic theory would not predict that such enterprises (and any other community of peer production, for example open source software) would thrive without any form of remuneration. The flip-side of direct remuneration — passion, enthusiasm, belief in free knowledge, in short, intrinsic motivations — could not alone (at least as standard theory goes) convincingly explain such prolonged efforts, given essentially away for free.
Early on the dawn of the Open Source/Libre software movement, some economists noted that successfully contributing to high-profile projects like Linux or Apache may translate in a strong résumé for a software developer, and proposed, as a way to reconcile traditional economic theory with reality, that whereas other forms of extrinsic motivation are available, sustained contribution to a peer production system could happen. But what about Wikipedia? The career incentive is largely absent in the case of the Free Encyclopedia, and is it really the case that intrinsic motivation such as pure altruism cannot be really behind the prolonged efforts of its contributors?
To understand this, a group of researchers at Sciences Po, Harvard Law School, and University of Strasbourg (among others) designed a series of online experiments with the intent of measuring social preferences, and administered them to a group of volunteer Wikipedia editors to understand whether contribution to Wikipedia can be explained by any of the main hypotheses that economists have thus far formulated regarding contribution to public goods. The researchers considered three hypotheses, two for intrinsic and one for extrinsic forms of motivation: pure altruism, reciprocity, and social image motives.
In more detail, the researchers asked a number of Wikipedia editors and contributors (all with a registered account) to participate in a series of experimental games specifically designed to measure the extent to which people behave according to one or more of the above social preferences — for example by either free-riding or contributing to the common pool in a public goods game. In addition to this, as a proxy measure for the “social image” hypothesis, they checked whether participants ever received a barnstar on their talk pages and whether they ever chose to display any of these on their user page (coding these individuals as “social signallers”). Finally, they matched each participant with their history of contribution of the participants, and sought to understand which of these measures can explain their edit counts.
The results suggest that reciprocity seems to be the driver of contribution for less experienced editors, whereas reputation (social image) seems to better explain the activity of the more seasoned editors, though, as the authors acknowledge, the goodness of fit of the regression estimates is not great. The study was at the center of a heated debate within the community about the usage of site-wide banners for recruitment purposes. On December 3, one of the authors gave a presentation about the results at Harvard, which is available online as an audio and video recording. According to the Harvard Crimson, he remarked “that the study is still in progress and more data needs to be collected”. The results are so far available in the form of a conference paper and as an unpublished working paper.