No Praise Without Effort: Experimental Evidence on How Rewards Affect Wikipedia's Contributor Community

No Praise Without Effort: Experimental Evidence on How Rewards Affect Wikipedia's Contributor Community - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2014, written by Michael Restivo and Arnout van de Rijt.

Overview

The successful provision of public goods through mass volunteering over the Internet poses a puzzle to classic social science theories of human cooperation. A solution suggested by recent studies proposes that informal rewards (e.g. a thumbs-up, a badge, an editing award, etc.) can motivate participants by raising their status in the community, which acts as a select incentive to continue contributing. Indeed, a recent study of Wikipedia found that receiving a reward had a large positive effect on the subsequent contribution levels of highly-active contributors. While these findings are suggestive, they only pertained to already highly-active contributors. Can informal rewards also serve as a mechanism to increase participation among less-active contributors by initiating a virtuous cycle of work and reward? Authors conduct a field experiment on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia in which authors bestowed rewards to randomly selected editors of varying productivity levels. Analysis of post-treatment activity shows t...