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What motivates Wikipedians
Oded NovDepartment of Management, Polytechnic University, New York onov@poly.edu
Cite as: Nov, Oded (2007). “What motivates Wikipedians”
Communications of the ACM 
50 (11) 60-64.
With more than 1.4 million articles created by users in English alone, Wikipedia, theweb-based user-created encyclopedia, is a prominent example of a collaborative, user-generated content outlet. Moreover, it is among the top ten fastest growing web brands(Nielsen-NetRating, 2006). While collaborative user-generated content in general, andWikipedia in particular, receive increasing attention in both the research and the businesscommunities, no empirical, quantitative data is available as to the reasons why peoplecontribute to Wikipedia. Contributors’ motivations seem to be critical for sustainingWikipedia and other collaborative user-generated content outlets, since their content iscontributed by volunteers (Denning, et al, 2005) who volunteer their time and talent for the creation of content in return for no monetary reward. Therefore, in order tounderstand what underlies user-generated content contribution, we would need to find outwhat motivates volunteer content contributors, and furthermore, to identify whichmotivations are associated with high, or low, levels of contribution.In their influential study of volunteers’ motivations, Clary and his colleagues (1998)identified six motivational categories:
 
Values:
volunteering gives volunteers an opportunity to express values related to altruisticand humanitarian concerns for others. Given that contributing content to Wikipediaenables contributors to actively show their concern for others by sharing knowledge withthem, it is expected that higher levels of the Values function among contributors will be positively related to the extent of contribution to Wikipedia.
Social:
volunteering may provide for volunteers the opportunities to be with their friendsor to engage in activities viewed favorably by important others. Given the collaborativenature of Wikipedia, we would expect contribution levels to be positively associated withSocial motivation levels.
Understanding:
through volunteering, individuals may have an opportunity to learn newthings and exercise their knowledge, skills and abilities. Thus, as contribution of contentto Wikipedia provides an opportunity for contributors to exercise their knowledge, skillsand abilities, we would expect to see higher contribution levels the more Wikipediacontributors are motivated by Understanding.
Career:
Volunteering may provide an opportunity to achieve career-related benefits suchas preparing for a new career or maintaining career-relevant skills. In the Wikipediacontext, we would expect to find some correlation between contribution levels and theCareer function, as Wikipedia offers to contributors a way to signal their knowledge andwriting skills to potential employers, however, we do not expect this to be a strongcorrelation, as most Wikipedians are not professional writers, or alternatively, becausemany Wikipedians contribute anonymously and therefore their contribution would not beuseful for career purposes.
 Protective:
involves protecting the ego from negative features of the self, reduce guiltover being more fortunate than others, or address one's own personal problems.Wikipedia seems to provide ample opportunity for contributors to address such needs andshare the fortune of having knowledge with others who do not have it. Therefore, wewould expect contribution to be positively associated with the Protective motivationcategory.
 Enhancement:
this is category somewhat related to the Protective category, however incontrast to the latter’s concern with eliminating negative aspects related the ego,2
 
Enhancement involves positive strivings of the ego. Here too, given the ampleopportunity for contributors to serve the ego and publicly exhibit their knowledge, wewould expect contribution level to be positively associated with the Enhancement level.Wikipedia relies on the open source model (Hendry, et al, 2006) where people contributetheir time, talent and knowledge in a collaborative effort to create publicly availableknowledge-based products. Therefore, in addition to the six general volunteeringmotivations, two other motivations – fun and ideology – used extensively in research onopen source software development (e.g., Hars & Ou, 2002; Stewart & Gosain, 2006,respectively) may also help to understand why people contribute to Wikipedia. In bothcases we would expect to see higher contribution levels associated with higher motivationlevels.THE SURVEYWikipedians, the people who create Wikipedia, volunteer their time, talent andknowledge for no monetary reward, and therefore our questionnaire included contributionmeasures as well as volunteering motivations measures. Contribution level was measuredas hours per week spent on contribution, a measure commonly used as a proxy for  participant contribution (Lakhani & Wolf, 2005), and motivation was measured using thevolunteering motivations scale (Clary et al, 1998) adjusted to the Wikipedia context, aswell as items adjusted from research on open source motivation measuring ideology(Stewart & Gosain, 2006) and fun (Hars & Ou, 2002). All of the motivation items in thequestionnaire were presented as statements with which Wikipedians were asked to statehow strongly they agree or disagree on a scale of 1 to 7. Examples of questionnaire itemsare provided in Table 1.3
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