Adders, Synthesisers - What Motivates Wikipedia Participants?

Milwaukee.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is Zack Hayat, whose interest is in active participation on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a space for collaborative content creation as well as for interpersonal interaction (for example through its community portals - or whatever they are positioned as in the various international Wikipedia versions - and discussion pages). There has been exponential growth in Wikipedia participants over the past years, but the number of regular editors has remained relative stable; growth has been mainly in less active editors. Some 60% of Wikipedia has been created by 5% of its users, as Jimmy Wales has said.

So what motivates contributors, and especially those who are highly active? From a uses and gratifications perspective, there can be various answers (cognitive, affective, integrative (personal or social) and diversionary needs may be fulfilled by participating); this can also be understood as motivations which are determined by values, social, cognitive, career-related, and enhancement factors.

But again, it is not possible to talk about active Wikipedia users in general here - people are more or less active, have various user levels (non-registered, registered, administrators, bureaucrats), and participate in article development in different ways (adding new content or synthesising existing material into a more coherent whole).

So, in particular, what motivates these adders and synthesisers? Zack's study examined this using an online questionnaire made available via community portals in the English, Germany, and Hebrew Wikipedias, and focussing on users who were making five or more edits per week. Respondents were mainly male (89%), aged 13-82 (with an average around 30), were well-educated (25% academic degrees, 60% high school graduates), and had been there for more than a year (68%).

Of the respondents, 247 were characterised mainly as adders, 115 were synthesisers, and 62 were somewhere between these two groups. Values and enhancement were mainly motivations for synthesisers, social, cognitive, and career aspects were motivations for adders - and in fact, social aspects were a disincentive for synthesisers. What emerges from this last fact in particular is that synthesiser users interact with others mainly through their article editing (or in other words, moderating) activities, not on a social basis. However, Zack notes that these findings are only preliminary - there may be further, other types of users, and the study's reliance on user self-reporting may also skew its results.

Technorati : AoIR 2009, Wikipedia, adders, motivation, participation, synthesisers, users
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