What You Didn’t Know About Motivating Contribution

Stephen Cribbett

Monday, September 19th, 2011 at 6:54 pm

As those of you involved in social networks and online communities will know, it's the intrinsic factors that often motivate people the most, for example 'connectedness', 'membership', 'sharing' and generosity'. However, a fascinating and recent study by two economists, Xiaoquan Zhang and Feng Zhu, examined contributors to the internet phenomena that is Wikipedia. For those of you not familiar with Wikipedia then it can be described as an online encyclopedia that can be edited and managed by literally anyone. What's more, Wikipedia is a collaborative site that stores details of all of the edits ever made and by whom, and there's also a live chat environment where contributors can discuss and collaborate.

What they found was that contributions from regular users (editors and authors) strangely dropped by around 40%. As the normal rules of participation would have it, these contributors should be 'more' active in order to get the work done since they care enough about Wikipedia to cover the downtime caused elsewhere. The conclusions that this episode has drawn are that contributors are also motivated by the notion of someone watching them. Why contribute when nobody is watching? To back this up, it happened to be those contributors that regularly access the live chat pages that were most disengaged.

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