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22 November 2007
Oded Nov, an assistant professor in the Department of Management, Polytechnic University, New York, USA[1], published an article in the November 2007 issue (volume 50, number 11) of the Communications of the ACM (Association for Computer Machinery), entitled 'What motivates Wikipedians?' which attempts to shed light on the motivations behind the activities of Wikipedians, ie the people who write the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.
The researcher emailed a number of Wikipedians found in an alphabetical Wikipedia users list and received 151 valid responses to his Web-based questionnaire[1].
Based on the results, we can construct the profile of a typical Wikipedian: About 30 years old[1], male[1], editing Wikipedia for fun, and believing in the ideals that information should be free and that it is important to help others.
Oded Nov reports that according to his findings Wikipedians consider fun and ideology ('information should be free') to be their primary motivations for contributing to the project. Their other self-reported reasons for contributing are that they feel it is important to help others, that editing Wikipedia helps them understand new things, that editing helps them feel needed, that it makes them feel less lonely, that it helps them in their business or career, and that other people want them to edit on Wikipedia[1].
However, Nov found that self-reported reasons for editing the free encyclopedia did not always correlate with actual contribution levels, as measured by the number of hours per week spent on Wikipedia: Specifically, the academic found that those who cited ideology as an important reason for contributing did not actually logged many hours on Wikipedia, while those who cited fun as a prime motivator did[1].
The academic also found that older Wikipedians are motivated more by the desires to feel needed and less lonely, when compared to younger contributors[1].
The research paper, as published on CACM, can be found at delivery.acm.org. An earlier version of the research paper can be read at http://faculty.poly.edu/%7Eonov/Nov_Wikipedia_motivations (PDF).
[edit] 1 References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Oded Nov 2007: What motivates Wikipedians? - Communications of the ACM, Movember 2007, Volume 50, Number 11.
[edit] 2 External links
- Academic homepage of Oded Nov, the author of the research paper.
- A forum discussion about Oded Nov's email
- O'Reilly Radar coverage
- Blog post about the paper