Why Do You Edit Wikipedia?
October 30, 2007 - 6:08pm — bexAccording to O'Reilly Radar, there's a new article by Oded Nov named "What Motivates Wikipedians?" Its only available in dead-tree format for the moment: Communications of the ACM, November 2007, Vol. 50, No. 11, pp. 60-64.
In it, Oded asked a very simple question... why do people edit Wikipedia? Why do you choose to spend your time and energy to give away free information? Open Source folks do this all the time on blogs and email lists... but its much harder to track down who wrote what on a Wikipedia page. There's less brand recognition for content creators on Wikipedia... so there's much less motivation. I'd wager most do it for altruistic reasons...
Oded's poll is not available online... so I made my own. If you edit Wikipedia, please take the poll! I'm curious to see how different the results will be.
ACM Survey Finding
Being a member of ACM, I have access to the electronic version. I hadn't read that article yet, but here is some basic findings rating reasons people contribute on a scale of 1-7
Fun: 6.1
Ideology: 5.6
Values: 4.0
Understanding: 3.9
Enhancement: 3.0
Protective: 2.0
Career: 1.7
Social: 1.5
There was not a direct correlation between reason and time for all categories. Ideology ("Information should be free") has less time actually contributed, and Social more, than the scale would indicate. Some speculation was offered as to why. The other 6 reasons had a direct correlation between reason and time spent.
Communications had a few good articles this month and I will probably post on some of the others myself.
personally...
I used wikipedia as a "respond to requests" tool. I got asked the same question a lot... so I started using Wikipedia as a form-letter response tool. As a result, I had to make sure Wikipedia's answer was up to date, and had the information I wanted to present.
The fact that "fun" is ranked so high is both interesting and disturbing... is it that they enjoy sharing information, or do they enjoy doing what Steven Colbert tells them to?
From a content management perspective, I guess this means that ECM needs to be far less boring, and far more fun, in order to encourage information sharing.
My main objection to ECM standards is along the same lines: where's the fun?
What Motivates Wikipedians
Dr. Nov has provided an earlier version of this research report on his faculty website that you may enjoy.
http://faculty.poly.edu/~onov/Nov_Wikipedia_motivations
Whether one admits it or
Whether one admits it or not, Wikipedia has made a major impact in providing quick and accurate online information on just about any subject matter.
My motivation for editing Wikipedia, is to help ensure that this accuracy is maintained. If you've got accurate knowledge on certain subject matters, why not share that knowledge with your fellow Netizens?
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