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thesis entitled

WIKIPEDIA AS COLLECTIVE ACTION: PERSONAL
INCENTIVES AND ENABLING STRUCTURES

presented by

BENJAMIN KEITH JOHNSON

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

Master of degree in Telecommunication,
Arts Information Studies and Media

 

 

 

 

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Date

 

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6/07 p:/CIRC/DateDue.indd-p.1

WIKIPEDIA AS COLLECTIVE ACTION: PERSONAL INCENTIVES AND
ENABLING STRUCTURES

By

Benjamin Keith Johnson

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media

2007

ABSTRACT

WIKIPEDIA AS COLLECTIVE ACTION: PERSONAL INCENTIVES AND
ENABLING STRUCTURES

By

Benjamin Keith Johnson

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia created by volunteers, and is an example of
how developments in software platforms and the low cost of sharing and coordinating on
the lntemet are leading to a new paradigm of creative collaboration on a massive scale.
This thesis addresses the questions of why individuals choose to give away their time and
effort and how the challenges associated with collective action are addressed by
Wikipedia’s technologies, organization, and community. Interviews with editors of the
encyclopedia were used to identify what personal gains and other motivations compel
contributors, what challenges to collaboration exist, and what technological and social

structures aid their ability to create a freely available repository of human knowledge.

Copyright by
BENJAMIN KEITH JOHNSON
2007

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank his supportive, insightful, and very patient committee: Dr.
Clifford Lampe, Dr. Nicole Ellison, and Dr. Kurt DeMaagd. Thanks are also due to Dr.
Johannes Bauer and the Quello Center J our Fixe for their helpful commentary during the
early stages of this project, and to Andrea Forte and Phoebe Ayers for their expert advice
on the recruitment of Wikipedians. Very special thanks are due to the numerous editors
who shared their time and insights in the interviews, and who made this such a
fascinating subject in the ﬁrst place. Lastly, but deﬁnitely not least, the author is

indebted to the constant support and understanding of Bridget Johnson.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................ vi
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. l
Collective Action ........................................................................... 9
Free-riding and social dilemmas ................................................ 1 I
Computer-Mediated Communication as Public Goods ............................... 14
Personal motivations ............................................................. 19

Organization ....................................................................... 21

Private/public boundary crossing ............................................... 22

Wikipedia as a public good ..................................................... 24

Research Questions ........................................................................ 27
METHOD ............................................................................................. 28
RESULTS ............................................................................................ 31
Identity on Wikipedia ..................................................................... 35
Enablers: Community, Technology, and Policy ....................................... 38
Perceptions of Wikipedia ................................................................. 43
DISCUSSION ....................................................................................... 47
APPENDIX: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS ...................................................... 59
REFERENCES ...................................................................................... 62

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. The multilingual Wikipedia Main Page, with direct links to the 10 largest
Wikipedias and a search box below. Further down the page, links are provided to the

remaining Wikipedias, sister projects, and the parent Wikimedia Foundation. ............ I

Figure 2. The Main Page for the English Wikipedia, which includes daily “Featured”
status articles, and news and trivia sections linked to relevant Wikipedia articles. The

9’ 6‘

Main Page also includes links like “Overview,” “Editing, Questions,” and “Help” in
addition to the standard strip of navigation on the leﬁ of the page. Further down the

page, links are provided to help, policy, and community resources. .......................... 2

Figure 3. An example of a Wikipedia article. “Jazz,” from the English Wikipedia. The
navigation on the left remains constant from the Main Page, and “discussion,” “edit this
page,” “history,” and other layers of this article appear in tabs near the top of the page.
Having signed in, additional tools like “my talk” and “my watchlist” appear at the very
top. This particular article makes use of “infoboxes” to the far right, which are

standardized templates for subjects in a particular area. Additionally, this article has been

tagged as one found lacking in veriﬁable references. ........................................... 3

Figure 4. Clicking on “edit this page” reveals the simple markup language that

constitutes the article. The editor is now free to alter the text and formatting. In addition

vi

to the formatting tools above the code, tools below allow for providing a summary of

changes made, previewing changes, or inserting characters. ................................. 4

Figure 5. Clicking on “discussion” reveals the talk page for the article. Discussion takes
the form of sections created by editors who wish to discuss or make note of an issue. The
example here of “Talk:Jazz” contains 45 separate sections. Sections can range some
simple notices from a single editor to long threads of debate among multiple editors.
Users are encouraged to sign their talk page posts with their usemames, using a built-in

convention that provides a timestamp and a link to their user pages. ........................ 5

Figure 6. Clicking on “history” reveals every edit, who made it, and when. There are
separate history pages for both the article page and the talk page, seen here. The section
of the article in which the change was made is noted, along with the optional edit
summaries left by editors. Users have the ability here to compare various versions of a

page, along the option of reverting the current page to an older version. ................... 6

Figure 7. English Wikipedia edit counts for the 27 interview respondents, as of June

vii

Wikipedia as Collective Action: Personal Incentives and Enabling Structures
The free, online encyclopedia Wikipedia is among the most prominent of current
projects on the Web that harness the distributed efforts of its users to create content
online. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) has seen
immense growth and has been the recipient of both criticism of its quality and reliability,
and accolades for its ability to collect and organize an unprecedented amount of
knowledge using an open-access model. This thesis is driven by an interest in the

question of why individuals are motivated to contribute to Wikipedia.

   
 

 

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search box below. Further down the page, links are provided to the remaining Wikipedias, sister projects,

and the parent Wikimedia Foundation.

Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (which is disputed — Wales claims to

be the sole founder and that Sanger was simply an employee) as a supplement to and

eventual replacement for Nupedia, an online encyclopedia with a more traditional

editorial process, Wikipedia today boasts over 7 million articles in 253 languages

(Wikipedia, 2007d), with over 1,864,000 articles and nearly 4,788,000 registered users in

the English Wikipedia alone. Wikipediaorg is currently the ninth most popular site on

the web (Alexa, 2007), with 36% of online Americans using Wikipedia as a reference

(Pew Internet, 2007). Figure 1 is a screenshot of the Wikipedia Main Page and Figure 2

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Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, where articles are connected to each other
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Figure 4. Clicking on “edit this page” reveals the simple markup language that constitutes the article. The
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Figure 6 shows the history for the “Jazz” talk page. These editing, discussion, and
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There is no centralized command and control within Wikipedia; every user is free
to edit the articles they want in the amount or way they see ﬁt — or not to edit at all. The
site prides itself on being a freely available resource and open to contributions and

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Figure 6. Clicking on “history” reveals every edit, who made it, and when. There are separate history
pages for both the article page and the talk page, seen here. The section of the article in which the change
was made is noted, along with the optional edit summaries left by editors. Users have the ability here to

compare various versions of a page, along the option of reverting the current page to an older version.

editors are selected by their peers to act as administrators. Wikipedia’s administrators are
given privileges and tools like the ability to enforce policies by banning vandals and
disruptive users, and the ability to protect or delete pages. There is a body of rules and
guidelines for behavior and editing practices on the site. Some policies are essential to
the project, maintaining constraints necessary for an encyclopedia like a “Neutral point of
view” or “No original research”. Other policies are more ﬂexible and subject to
adjustment by users. Every policy page is a wiki article (located in a “Wikipedia

namespace” separate from the encyclopedia articles), which, of course, has its own wiki

talk page, too. The collaborative approach on Wikipedia is based on consensus, meaning
that changes to both article content and site policies and procedures are decided upon by
the outcome of discussion taking place on talk pages. The project also has
administrative-type positions and policies dedicated to mediating conﬂict which
inevitably occurs between editors working on articles. Beyond this, further governance
belongs to Jimmy Wales, who plays an informal but inﬂuential role as founder, and to the
Wikimedia Foundation, the small non-proﬁt entity created to oversee Wikipedia and its
sister projects like Wikitionary and Wikiquote.

Wikipedia has also developed tools beyond the basic wiki features, in order to
manage problems like vandalism or editing problems, such as an automated list of recent
changes to the encyclopedia, personal “watchlists” noticeboards, article templates, and
automated bots that perform custodial tasks. Finally, registered users are given their own
space on Wikipedia to present themselves and provide an additional place for discussion.
“User pages” and their talk pages are used by editors to create a sense of identity and
reputation and allow other editors to contact them.

The Wikipedia phenomenon is made possible ﬁrst of all by its use of the wiki
(“wiki-wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick”) software platform that allows for instant editing of
web pages. The wiki was developed by Ward Cunningham in 1995, and has found
applications in a range of other encyclopedic or knowledge base projects, and in private
projects using wikis for collaborative work by businesses and other organizations
(Cortese, 2004; Sunstein, 2007). Wikipedia remains the most successful and prominent
use of the wiki. The second Wikipedia enabler is the use of the GNU Free

Documentation License (GFDL), adopted from the free/open-source software movement.

Wikipedia is open source, in the sense that it uses a “copyleﬁ” scheme to keep all content
generated by contributors freely accessible and immune to capture by anyone who would
seek to restrict in any way the use of materials copied or derived from Wikipedia.
Additionally, the specific wiki platform used, MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org), is
free/open source software. The commitment to openness in Wikipedia is inherited
directly from the free/open source movement, which in turn had its origins in the
openness and sharing in early software development and in science, which were
important precedents for innovation in those fields (Lerner & Tirole, 2005, pp. 48-50).
Wikipedia is seen as an important part of a larger trend in online platforms and
the production of content, often referred to as “Web 2.0.” Coined by Tim O’Reilly, the
Web 2.0 label has received much attention, including backlash due to perceived overuse
of the term and excessive Optimism about the model’s potential. Yet, the success of sites
like Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, MySpace, and Facebook implies that
the paradigm has much potential, like the free/open source software movement before it.
This success has begun to alter notions about the utility of the Internet, the importance of
amateurs, and the nature of culture and its production. Wikipedia is an important
bellwether for the success of Web 2.0 and user-generated content, as it is a project of
considerable seriousness and signiﬁcance, enjoys very high trafﬁc and search rankings,
and has already taken a prominent position in public discourse due to debates over its
reliability, utility, and vandalism scandals. Also, contributors to Wikipedia (or at least

frequent contributors) tend to be highly committed, referring to themselves as

“Wikipedians.”

The encyclopedia is a product of volunteers coming together to create content on
a large scale, and economic and sociological theory tells us that the provision of a public
good like this is especially challenging, requiring particular conditions. The approach
towards motivations here will be economic, rather than social psychological; how is it
possible that collective action occurs when rational individuals have no monetary
incentives to volunteer their time, knowledge, and expertise? Of special interest is the
long term viability of Wikipedia, design implications for this encyc10pedia as well as
future projects, and the more general implications for the viability of user-generated
content online.
Collective Action

The creation of Wikipedia is an instance of collective action, which is the
provision of a public good, a speciﬁc form of commons (Hardin, 1982; Olson, 1965).
Wikipedia is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (Wikipedia, 2007a), meaning
that With a few exceptions like the front page and articles prone to vandalism, anyone can
contribute articles, article sections, revisions, citations, or simply grammar and
punctuation corrections to the encyclopedia. Coupled with the fact that it is a free
resource to anyone (in two senses: both free of charge, and freely distributed content
through GNU licensing), Wikipedia is structured as a commons. The term “commons”
has been increasingly used in the past decade to describe (or prescribe) freely accessible
information, typically online, in arrangements that use open access approaches to
facilitate sharing and altering of information in order to promote information creation and
dissemination (Bollier, 2007). More generally and traditionally, the commons concept is

used to describe shared resources that are susceptible to “social dilemmas” caused by the

“free-riding” that results from shared use without market or state oversight (Kollock &
Smith, 1996; Ostrom, 1990). Perhaps the most well known explanation of free-riding and
the dilemmas that result is Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons,” published in
Science (1968). Hardin drew his example of an open pasture from nineteenth-century
pamphleteer William Forster Lloyd. In the illustration, herdsmen sharing a grazing
commons each seek to maximize their number of cattle, while ensuring their livestock
remain sufﬁciently fed. Each herdsman gains directly from adding more cattle of his
own, even when the pasture becomes overcrowded; each only bears a fraction of the costs
of overcrowding, however, so the rational herdsmen each continue to add more and more
animals, resulting in disaster.

Like most other theorists who have studied commons, Elinor Ostrom has
described two variable properties of a commons: subtractability and exclusion (Hess &
Ostrom, 2007, 8-10; Ostrom, 1990, pp. 30-33). Subtractability is synonymous with
rivalry; goods may be either rivalrous or non-rivalrous. An apple is a rivalrous good, as
one person’s use of the good limits the next person’s. lnforrnation, in contrast, is non-
rivalrous, as one person’s use of information does not limit the next person’s. The
tangible form in which information is ﬁxed may be a rivalrous good, however. Exclusion
is the extent to which access to a commons is open or closed. Wikipedia is open, with the
exceptions mentioned of protected pages, which are relatively closed resources.
Exclusion may be achieved either through membership requirements, or imposed costs.
Commons that are both non-rivalrous and non-exclusive are referred to as “public
goods.” Often, public goods will not be purely non-rivalrous and non-exclusive. Roads

and national defense are classic examples of public goods, but roads are certainly prone

10

to congestion (and toll or weight limit restrictions), therefore they are not purely non-
rivalrous or non-exclusive, however. The characteristics which lead to a resource’s
public good status are typically inherent properties of the resource, making a public good
a naturally occurring phenomenon.

F rec-riding and social dilemmas.

The central problem of all commons, regardless of rivalry or exclusion, is the
free-rider problem, in whichindividuals take advantage of a resource’s availability and
overconsume, fail to contribute, undercontribute, fail to observe the rules of resource use,
hinder the use of others, or otherwise damage the utility of the commons resource. This
free-riding leads to “social dilemmas,” instances in which the individual incentive to free
ride leads to a damaged commons or a public good never being produced. The
predicament of free-riding has been formalized into several models: the prisoner’s
dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, and collective action (Ostrom, 1990, p. 2).

The prisoner’s dilemma is a more general and mathematical model that describes
the free-rider challenge to a commons. The basic formulation of the prisoner’s dilemma
consists of two prisoners complicit in a crime who are being held imprisoned separately,
with no communication possible between the two. Each has the option of implicating the
other. If they both refuse, prisoners A and B will both gain, but refusal by A, for
example, bears the risk of playing “sucker” to B should he implicate A. For both players,
the overall risk in implicating the other is always less, so prisoners will choose to
implicate their accomplice, even though it produces suboptimal outcomes for both

prisoners (Axelrod, 1984; Olson, 1965; Ostrom, 1990).

ll

The tragedy of the commons paradigm introduced above was an early model and
remains an inﬂuential one for the analysis of commons. 1n Hardin’s words,

Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without

limit - in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men

rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the ﬁeedom

of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. (1968, n.p.).

His conclusion was clearly pessimistic (Hardin’s own purpose was stemming
overpopulation), stating that the commons must either be privatized or subject to state
control.

In contrast to the tragedy of the commons, which deals with consumption in a
rivalrous commons, collective action describes the process of, and challenges to, the
provision of public goods (where non-rivalry makes consumption irrelevant). Olson’s
seminal work The Logic of Collective Action (1965) largely addressed the question of
how group size impacts free-riding and the ability of a group to meet its collective goals.
Essentially, individuals in large groups bear a smaller ﬁ'action of the costs imposed on the
group and receive a smaller fraction of the group’s beneﬁts, so they are less adverse to
free-riding. Olson described large groups as “latent” and suggested they can only achieve
collective action as a by-product of other, non-collective activities. In contrast, a smaller
group may be either privileged, “a group such that each of its members, or at least some
one of them, has an incentive to see that the collective good is provided, even if he has to
bear the full burden of providing it himself” (pp. 49-50), or intermediate, “a group in
which no single member gets a share of the beneﬁt sufﬁcient to give him an incentive to

provide the himself,” making coordination, organization, and monitoring necessary (p.

50).

12

Ostrom (1990) emphasized that there are institutional solutions to the free-rider
problem. Since Hardin’s article in 1968, many have assumed that the tragedy of the
commons is inevitable unless coercion is applied by the state, or resources are privatized.
The empirical record does not bear this out, however, and Ostrom used detailed case
studies of ﬁshing, forests, groundwater basins, and pasture to demonstrate the means by
which commons may be effectively governed collectively. A key point of her work is
that the solutions necessary for any commons’ survival are often speciﬁc to that resource,
though there are seven common characteristics: clear boundaries exist, rules are tailored
to ﬁt the resource, individuals affected by policies can participate in rule-making,
monitoring occurs, sanctions are graduated, there are conﬂict resolution mechanisms, and
external forces recognize the right to organize (p. 90). While survival of a commons is
possible, the tools necessary are arrived at through trial and error approaches, and no one-
size-ﬁts-all solution exists.

Ostrom described three major challenges, or puzzles, that groups trying to
maintain a commons face: the problems of supply, credible commitment, and mutual
monitoring (p. 42). The problem of supply refers to the provision of rules and
mechanisms to manage cooperation, and this is of special interest to Wikipedia, as the
site’s policies are created and reﬁned to a large extent by the editors themselves. Ostrom
pointed out that the provision of a set of rules is a public good in itself, so that the group
faces a second-order social dilemma. The problem of credible commitment is a challenge
that is potentially irrelevant in online distributed efforts, provided there is a large and
active enough user base that defectors can easily be replaced. Lastly, mutual monitoring

is another puzzle that seems well addressed by Wikipedia, because of the transparency of

13

actions on the site. However, costs may be incurred by those who punish others for
violating the rules, in the form of interpersonal conﬂict and escalation, suggesting that
monitoring and policing one’s peers may not always be an attractive proposition to users.
Computer-Mediated Communication as Public Goods
While the promise of a networked society is often described as the ability of

everyone to participate in the global village, especially in the age of Web 2.0, an often
surprisingly small segment of the population actually contributes to the ﬂow of
information online. Recent estimates suggest that 4.56% of Wikipedia visits involve

editing, which is quite high compared to 0.2% for F lickr and 0.16% for YouTube
(Auchard, 2007; Tancer, 2007). For the most recent date statistics were available,
October 2006, the English Wikipedia had 43,001 Wikipedians who made more than ﬁve
edits that month, and only 4,330 made more than 100 edits. Only. 151,934 of the over 4.5
million registered English language Wikipedians at the time had ever made more than 10
edits (Wikimedia, 2007). Therefore, a “production function,” the relationship between
the proportion contributing and the proportion produced (Kollock, 1999, p. 226), is a
useful way to examine collective action online because it explains who is doing what
work, which can shed light on organizational and incentive structures. The production
function tends to follow a power-law distribution of behavior. Research on free/open
source software found that 10% of contributors wrote over 70% of the code and 20%
contributed over 80% (Ghosh & Prakash, in Lerner & Tirole, 2005, p. 54). Much code
gets written by a small few, even in distributed efforts — the Linux kernel, for example,
has a Gini coefﬁcient (a measure of inequality Where 0 represents perfect equality and 1

is maximum inequality) of 0.79 (Ghosh, 2005, p. 35), and a 2000 study by Ghosh and

14

Prakash found that “more than three-quarters of the nearly 13,000 contributors made only
one contribution; only one in twenty-ﬁve had more than ﬁve contributions.” (in Lerner &
Tirole, 2005, p. 54).

This often “elitist” nature of free/open source software production (Lerner &
Tirole, 2002) and other open-access projects may be mitigated by a key attribute,
however. The “modularity” of free/open source software, division into multiple discrete
components, seems to encourage the distribution of work, and it is often suggested that
the majority who make small changes (or identify bugs) are indispensable to the
production of quality F/OSS software (Ghosh, 2005, pp. 35-36). Valloppillil (1998)
found that ﬁve times as many contributors reported bugs, rather than write code (in
Lerner & Tirole, 2005, p. 54). Modularity appears to be a necessary requirement for
successful F/OSS projects (Lerner & Tirole, 2005, p. 62-64), and modularity is a clear
strength of the encyclopedia format that Wikipedia ﬁts into (Benkler, 2001 ; Cofﬁn,
2006). ‘

Thinking in terms of a production function is also useful for describing small
groups who provide a good for their own unique purposes. These are the privileged and
intermediate groups described by Olson (1965) and in further depth by Russell Hardin
(1982), and these group types begin to explain why personal motivations can lead to
collective action. Instances of privileged groups producing public goods were rare until
the low-cost sharing opportunities created by the Internet appeared. Small groups, or
even individuals, may now produce content for their own purposes, and make it available
for others who would use the material. There is no inherent risk, and the potential use by

others may even act as an additional incentive. This view of contribution as a “side effect

15

of private behavior” in the presence of very low costs (Kollock, 1999, p. 229) ties in
directly with the reconceptualization of collective action as private/public boundary
crossing discussed below (Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2005).

In the online environment, the changes in costs and beneﬁts are what alter the
nature of the public good and the possibilities for collective action (Kollock, p. 223). The
Internet radically reduces costs for contribution and cooperation, and it increases the
usefulness and availability of existing information. Reducing costs of cooperation
matter, as it provides opportunities to “meet, plan, and discuss” (Kollock, p. 224) without
the constraints of space or time. Additionally, software design and other technological
aspects can function as enablers, too.

In contrast to free/open source software development, Kollock and Smith (1996)
described the major social dilemmas in Usenet, an early and prominent online
community, along with the potential for overcoming challenges to contribution. Like
Wikipedia, Usenet is very large, lacks central authority, and is non-commercial. Potential
dilemmas stemming from free-riding included low levels of discussion, unwillingness to
answer questions put forth by others, off-topic discussion, misuse of limited bandwidth,
and disregard for established norms. Drawing from Ostrom’s recommendations for
successful design of commons management (Ostrom, 1990, p. 90), they critiqued
Usenet’s ability to facilitate collaboration and found that larger groups online actually led
to less free-riding, because the effects of free-riding impact more users and are more
noticeable and the reduced costs of communication online made collective action more
feasible. While Usenet had boundaries, they were difﬁcult to defend against violations

unless membership restrictions or “kill ﬁles” were used. They also found that Usenet had

16

limitations in terms of the kinds of rules that Ostrom stated should be both tailored to the
speciﬁc community and created by that community (p. 90). Usenet made use of F AQ’s,
though not consistently, and the policies did not always incorporate community input and
were not always effectively communicated to new members. Lastly, they found that the
characteristics of computer-mediated communication, especially identity (through email
addresses) and the archiving of conversation, made low-cost monitoring and informal
sanctioning possible.

Benkler (2001, 2005) has addressed the challenges and potential of moving the
free/open source model to applications beyond software, a phenomenon he terms
“commons-based peer production,” incorporating “commons” because of the free, open
nature of these projects. He has advocated viewing peer production as third means of
organizing labor, an alternative and complement to the market and the firm, for the
creation of information products when human creativity and skill is distributed and
variable, and the transaction costs reduced by the Internet would otherwise hinder
collaborative effort. “Transaction costs” refer to the economic costs involved in any sort
of economic exchange or allocation of resources (e. g. search or contractual costs). Coase
(1937) introduced the concept to explain why in the market, ﬁrms exist to organize
resources instead of a total reliance on the price mechanism for the allocation of all
resources. Information technology has the potential to reduce costs and barriers involved
with exchange and coordination of resources, and Benkler (2001) characterizes peer
production a distinct form of organization resulting from an altered transaction cost

structure.

17

Using Wikipedia as one of his examples, Benkler emphasized the importance of
modularity and “granularity” (the extent to which tasks can be broken down into small
and variable contributions) for collaboration to occur in a commons (2001). Contributors
are self-selected, which is a valuable asset, but it also results in some individuals
misjudging their abilities and making poor contributions, which is why peer review and
mutual monitoring are necessary. While the technological platform (in Wikipedia’s case,
the wiki), allows for smooth and effortless of integration of contributions, social
behaviors are needed to remove that which is not worthy of integration, whether
vandalism, biased information, or poor writing. Following Lerner and Tirole (2002),
Benkler addressed the potential motivations for commons-based peer production,
consisting of intrinsic, hedonic motivations (enjoyment of the activities and the creativity
involved), and both monetary and social-psychological motivations, which he sees as
often inversely related. Wikipedia is a strictly volunteer, non-proﬁt endeavor, so a strong
sense of social involvement and/or ideological commitment to the project’s goals may be
necessary a motivation, along with intrinsic enjoyment.

That social commitment may at times take the form of a gift economy. Kollock’s
(1999) analysis emphasized the gift-giving nature of online communities, drawing from
Rheingold’s (2000) early work on the WELL. The existence of gift economies and
reciprocity in gift giving was formally described by Marcel Mauss in 1925, and later
developed by Claude Levi-Strauss (Godelier, 1999, pp. 10-18). The giving of a gift
creates an obligation for later reciprocity, and can also be used to reinforce or signify
solidarity and relationships between givers and receivers. Gifts have also been

incorporated into the discussion of computer-mediated communication as public goods

18

by several analyses of free/open-source software projects (Bergquist & Ljungberg 2001;
Raymond, 2000; Zeitlyn, 2003). Two deﬁnitions are provided by Kollock for gift
transactions, taken from Canier (1991) and Bell (1991). Carrier stated that a gift is
distinct from acommodity in that it is provided with an implicit expectation for some sort
of recompense at a later, unspeciﬁed date. Bell described gifts as involving those
transactions that beneﬁt social relationships rather than the production of commodities
(Kollock, p. 221-222). Online transactions are surprising, however, when understood as
gifts, because individuals are not likely to engage in direct person-to-person
reciprocation, especially as groups become large as less deﬁned. Rather, provision of
gifts and the subsequent reciprocation occurs in the aggregate. This creates a sense of
users feeling entitled to help or information, especially as they continue to provide it to
others, a pattern of reciprocation termed “generalized exchange” by Ekeh (1974). This
unique form of gift giving is “both more generous and riskier than traditional gift
exchange” (Kollock, p. 222). Generalized exchange provides strong incentives for
cooperation, yet creates opportunities for free-riding, especially in unstructured
communities. Free-riding may not necessarily be the result of self-interest, but may stem
from a perceived lack of efﬁcacy or the challenges associated with coordination, where
users may not know what to contribute, or how to incorporate their work (p. 223).

Personal motivations.

Survey studies have identiﬁed motivations for contributors to user-generated
content’s predecessor, free/open source software, which can broadly be characterized as
falling into four categories: social, personal use, career, and ideological motivations

(Ghosh, 2005, pp. 32-35; Lakhani & Wolf, 2005, pp. 2-6). Additionally, a division can

19

be made between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations (Lakhani & Wolf, 2005, pp.4-7).
Intrinsic motivations are those directly related to the task, where individuals ﬁnd the
activity worth doing for its own sake. Extrinsic motivations include direct and indirect
economic gains, and may include payment to participate, signaling of skills (Lerner and
Tirole, 2005a), reputation-building, and skill development (Lakhani & Wolf, 2005, pp. 6-
7). Ghosh instead characterized motivation as either selfish or altruistic (2005, pp. 32-
33). Selﬁsh motives may be either intrinsic or extrinsic, whereas altruistic motives are
either community-based or ideologically driven.

For free/open source software development, social motivations included an
obligation to reciprocate, learning, improving, and sharing skills, intellectual stimulation,
working with a team, enjoying the sense of community and belonging, earning
recognition, and participating in a new form of collaboration. Career motivations
included direct monetary gain for contribution, career-related reputation building or
signaling of skills, professional need for the software, improving software needed for
work, and improving one’s professional opportunities. Ideological motivations included
obligation to reciprocate, belief in open code, and a desire to beat, compete with, or limit
the power of closed systems. Personal use motivations included non-work needs, solving
a problem, intellectual stimulation, ego gratiﬁcation through recognition of one’s work,
and having the opportunity to see an idea for a software tool or feature come to ﬁ'uition.
Motivations may fall into more than one of these four categories, 6. g. reciprocity (Ghosh,
2005, pp. 32-35; Lakhani & Wolf, 2005, p. 15; Lerner & Tirole, 2005, pp. 57-58).

Ghosh found that across motivation categories, the majority of respondents

(55.7%) reported taking more than they give, while only 14.6% reported giving as much

20

as they took and 9% reported giving more (2005, p. 33). Receiving more than one gives
is necessary for extrinsic motivations, as they are rational, selﬁsh motives which require a
net gain. The net gain consists of both immediate and delayed payoffs (Lerner & Tirole,
2005, pp. 56-57). Kollock also addressed the motivations question for cooperative online
activity in general, and found three possible general motivations driven by self interest,
and two driven by social considerations. The three general self-interest motivations are
anticipated reciprocity, reputation, and efﬁcacy, and the two social motivations are
altruism and group commitment.

Organization.

Lessi g (2000) characterized four distinct means of constricting behavior: code,
law, norms, and the market. Both code and norms regulate actions in Wikipedia, in that
the wiki platform, community guidelines and rules, and social norms all enable certain
behaviors while constraining others. Norms become especially prominent as repeated
interactions occur and individuals and the community learn individual decisions are poor
and which lead to optimal outcomes. Inquiry into the Prisoner’s Dilemma game has
demonstrated that, given certain conditions, repeated interaction mitigates the impulse to
free ride as participants become more aware of the nature of the game and optimal
outcomes (Axelrod, 1984, p. 10-11).

Kollock (1999) described a few potential limitations of online coordination. First
of all, projects must be “inherently interesting” in order to attract and maintain a group of
users willing to volunteer their time. This also raises the question of how applicable the
user-generated content paradigm is to other possible endeavors that are not as interesting

to potential contributors as Wikipedia or Linux are, for example. Second, large and

21

complex projects like these require a sufﬁcient base of contributors, a critical mass.
Lastly, structural features of the project must emphasize the important features and tools
that enable contribution. A usable design and the ability to make responsive changes are
necessary for success.

In free/open source software development, effective communication is crucial to
coordination of the process, which explains why the movement really only gained
momentum with the advent of the Internet (Lerner & Tirole, 2005, p. 52). Ghosh found
that 65.3% of surveyed free/open source contributors were regularly in contact with 1-10
other contributors (2005, p. 37). In contrast, Wikipedia and other wiki projects have
communication systems built in. Additionally, the amount of centralization in the
organization of F/OSS projects varies, ranging ﬁ'om those with a clear central leader
(Linux) to those that are more democratic (Apache). Common features, however, are that
the leader has little “formal” authority, but much “real” authority, as their
recommendations are very likely to be followed, that there is a certiﬁcation process for
product, that the community trusts the leader’s motives, that the leader is able to create
consensus and avoid forking, and that the leader communication the project’s visions,
goals, and procedures effectively (Lerner & Tirole, 2005, pp. 64-65).

Private/public boundary crossing.

Following Lupia and Sin (2003), Bimber et a1. (2005) challenged the existing
traditional conception of collective action based on the observations that Olson’s
proposal regarding group size does not carry out online, the choice to participate or not is
no longer “binary,” and that formal organization is decreasingly important to successful

action. Binary means participation as a yes or no proposition; instead, in the interactive

22

online environment, the choices about whether to participate or how to participate are
often broken up into smaller segments. And, as observation of online communities and
projects suggests, size and formal organization are less necessary for successful collective
action online.

Bimber et al.’s reconceptualization of collective action drew from F ulk, Flanagin,
Kalman, Monge, and Ryan’s (1996) description of “communalities,” public goods
created by the sharing of information resources by a group. While communalities are
straightforward public goods, and typically involve a binary decision to participate,
Bimber et al. went on to describe “second-order communalities,” behavior in which
sharing of information is incidental and broken up into smaller opportunities to
participate, yet contributes to a greater aggregate which is the public good. Basic
functions like searching for information or networking with others are not done for the
purpose of sharing information, but end up contributing to the aggregation that forms a
second-order communality. Essentially, “private discourse and resources” (Bimber et al.,
2005, p. 374) are shifted to the public sphere with no or little cost. Today’s Web 2.0
platforms can capture private behavior and allow users to make it public, so that
bookmarking becomes a shared activity (delicious, Digg), diaries and opinions become
blogs, and photos and movies shared with friends and families are now shared with
anyone (Flickr, YouTube) with minimal effort required from the contributor. Bimber et
al. saw this crossing of the boundary between private and public as the key to
reconceptualizing collective action in our contemporary collaborative media. Wikipedia
is not as intuitive an example, initially, but interviews with Wikipedians here and in

Bryant, Forte, & Bruckman (2005) suggested that the editing of articles is often an

23

outgrowth of existing interests and activities users are engaged in. Also, within free/open
source software, developers are far more likely to use something they would use
themselves (Hertel, Niedner, & Herrmann, 2003, pp. 1171 , 1174).

Wikipedia as a public good.

As an open commons resource that requires the provision of its content by
volunteer contributors, Wikipedia is clearly a public good and therefore subject to social
dilemmas. It has distinct technological and social characteristics that both shape the
nature of and provide possible solutions to those dilemmas. The technological
characteristics of Wikipedia which appear to enable the sorts of interaction and behavior
present include important wiki tools such talk pages, article histories, user pages, and
watchlists. These have ﬁgured prominently into existing discussion of Wikipedia (Bryant
et al., 2005; Viégas, Wattenberg, & Dave, 2004), and will here as well. Article histories
are similar to the transparent “institutional history” preserved by a free/open source
project. Other similarities present in Wikipedia include a sense of meritocracy, a
“benevolent dictator,” and modularity (Cofﬁn, 2006). Other features of the site that make
collaborative contribution possible include WikiProjeCts, noticeboards like the Village
Pump, and Wikipedia “namespace” articles that delineate policies and guidelines. Active
Wikipedians have several means to communicate with each other: article talk pages, user
talk pages, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels, mailing lists, and namespace articles.

Research into editing practices in Wikipedia has examined the process by which
contributors become encultured (Bryant, Forte, & Bruckman, 2005) and considered the
motivations and incentives behind “authorship” of articles and other contribution

behavior (Forte & Bruckman, 2005). In Bryant, et al., the emphasis was on the typical

24

process by which individuals come to contribute: they began as readers, slowly became
peripheral contributors, and then became dedicated and involved collaborators. This
reoccurring pattern of initiation resulted from the architecture of the community and its
tools, they argued, and it has major implications for why users contribute and continue to
do so:

Likewise, the design of communities in an online environment must meaningfully

structure participants’ contributions in a way that sustains involvement. That

means moving beyond the use of straightforward rewards and into the realm of
incentive economies that allow productive participants to achieve higher levels of

efﬁcacy and responsibility in the community. (Forte & Bruckman, 2005, p. 5).
Therefore, it would be useful in the present and future studies to include contributors who
have not continued their involvement, to begin to address questions of sustainability and
incentives for continuance.

In some ways, the Wikipedia community resembles that of the scientiﬁc
community, relying on peer review and a sense of contributing to humanity’s knowledge
(Forte & Bruckman, 2005, p. 2-4), though not through primary research, but rather the
collection and organization of information. While explicit authorship credit does not
exist (and cannot, given the long history of collaborative contributions and revisions to
most articles) as an incentive for Wikipedia articles, there does seem to be a pervasive
sense of credit within Wikipedia, “as reward for a contribution to the community” (p. 4).
A sense of reciprocity, a gift economy, may play a large role in editing activity.

It would be a mischaracterization to label readers of the site or marginal
contributors as free-riders. The purpose, after all, is to provide a freely available

resource, and contributors should beneﬁt from increased usage of their contributions, as it

provides a motivation (writers and editors work in anticipation of others ﬁnding their

25

work useful) and increases the notoriety of the site, drawing in even more readers and
contributors, building a network effect. The term “network effect,” or network
externality, describes the condition where a good becomes more valuable as more
individuals consume that particular good (Economides, 1996, pp. 678-679; Reed, 2001).
As more people continue to use Wikipedia as a resource and contribute to it, its value
increases and incentives to use and contribute to it in the ﬁrture strengthen. Those who
do not contribute to Wikipedia but use it are not free-riders, because of the nature of the
medium — it is a networked digital good, which means it is decidedly non-rivalrous. In
this sense, Wikipedia may be one of Olson’s privileged groups, where an individual or
small group provides a good they would have anyway, and allows others to freely utilize
the open and indivisible resource. The provision of a public good involves a social
dilemma of production. So, while Wikipedia readers are not free-riders per se, in the end
someone must contribute and have an incentive for doing so.

In contrast to Wikipedia, experiments in other types of open source writing have
largely failed because ﬁction or news is typically only read once (Shirky, 2005, p. 484).
The repetitive use and utility of software makes continuous review and alteration
possible. The same holds true for a speciﬁc kind of writing — reference works. This
suggests that the encyclopedia format is critical to Wikipedia’s success. Yet, after six
years, persistent questions remain about the quality of the free encyclopedia. For such a
high-proﬁle collaboration to remain subject to the sort of critiques over quality and
usefulness it does leads one to question the viability of “collective intelligence” and user-
generated content. A wide range of work has yet to be done on Wikipedia - not just

adding new topics, but improving the existing content.

26

In discussing Wikipedia as an open—access commons, it is also worth noting that
the site has slightly moved away from its original degree of openness, as vandalism
scandals in 2005 led to increased limits on starting new articles and editing by
anonymous or new members. Vandalism remains a serious threat to Wikipedia,
periodically igniting a row over content that may have only been visible for a short time.
Vandalism repair may represent a serious drain on the resources of the editing
community, though there are users whose primary role is to clean up vandalism or revert
to pro-vandalized versions.

Finally, Wikipedia is also beginning to experience forking (when an open source
project splits into rival versions) and competition: Citizendium, Digital Universe, and
others are emerging as challengers to the Wikipedia model, focusing more on scholar
expertise and pages that are less volatile. F orking is discussed by Raymond (2000) as a
major deterrent to contribution to free/open-source software projects, so much so that
actual instances of forking are quite rare, due to strong community norms against it.
However, the nature of the open source licensing makes forking a distinct possibility.
Research Questions

The following research questions will be addressed by the study:

RQI. What technological and social features enable Wikipedia’s survival as a public
good and provide individual incentives for contribution?

RQ2. How are Wikipedia’s various limitations and challenges related to public good
features and social dilemmas?

RQ3. What do the public good features speciﬁc to Wikipedia imply about its long-term

viability?

27

Method

A convenience sample of 27 Wikipedia editors was recruited through two ofﬁcial
Wikipedia mailing lists, posts on the Village Pump (an area on Wikipedia for posting
assorted community news), posts on three WikiProject pages (WikiProjects are groups
devoted to improving articles on a given topic, e. g. jazz), and through snowball sampling.
Several respondents saw the recruitment ad when it was recirculated on other Wikipedia-
related sites and lists. The editors were interviewed in March and April of 2007, with 15
of them electing to conduct the interview by email and another 12 consenting to hour-
long phone interviews.

Editors ranged in age from 20 to 64, with a median of 34, and only included a
single female. While it has been documented that free/open source software is dominated
by males, around 98% (Ghosh, 2005, pp. 29-30; Lakhani & Wolf, 2005, p. 8), what little
data exists on Wikipedia suggests a much higher female presence — possibly 40%
(Tancer, 2007). The same data set also found that 82% of editors were over 35 years old,
suggesting that a perception of Wikipedians as only teens and twentysomethings is likely
amﬂh

Of all respondents, the newest editor had been contributing to Wikipedia since
August 2006, while several others had been editing since 2002 and 2003. The number of
individual edits to the site self-reported by interview subjects ranged from around 200 to
nearly 40,000. Not all editors knew their edit count, though others kept close track. Edit
counts were conﬁrmed with the lnteriot tool (available at
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~Interiot/cgi-bin/Tooll/wannabe_kate), and upon follow-up in

June 2007, most editors had increased their count by anywhere from a few hundred to a

28

several thousand. The median edit count for the 27 subjects in June was 8,677. Edit
counts include even minor edits to articles, as well as contributions to talk and policy

pages. See Figure 7 for the distribution of individual edit counts.

Respondent Edit Counts

50,000
40,000
30,000
I June 2007 Edit Count
20,000

10,000

 

0
L Individual Respondents

 

 

Figure 7. English Wikipedia edit counts for the 27 interview respondents, as of June 2007.

As a whole, the subjects recruited for interviews were subject to several biases,
most notably a self-selection bias. Additionally, users were US. residents who edited the
English Wikipedia (just one of over 250 Wikipedias) and frequented the venues where
recruitment notices were placed. These locations were used for their visibility within
Wikipedia, in order to reach a large number of users. While snowball sampling and
posting on three WikiProject pages led to the recruitment of some casual editors, the
respondents tended to be committed Wikipedians. Another possible bias was that of age;
presumably many editors (and even administrators) on the site are under 18 years old.
The sample consisted of 11 administrators for the English Wikipedia and one former

administrator, 3 of who were members of the Arbitration Committee, 2 banned users, and

29

one previously banned user. Interviewing administrators was likely to result in positive
attitudes towards Wikipedia, in contrast to banned users, who would be more likely to
criticize perceived weaknesses. Additionally, administrators were not necessarily
representative of the “average” Wikipedia editor, because they engage in additional
duties and are likely to be more active and invested in the project.

Qualitative analysis of the phone and email interviews was conducted, using the
constant-comparative technique (Lindlof, 2002, pp. 218-221), categorizing responses
until the data set was exhausted. This was done by transcribing interviews and entering a
summary of each subject’s response to each question (and/or a short summarizing quote)
into a database, allowing for the identiﬁcation of trends and variation by comparing all of
the responses for each question. For some questions, respondents were in general
agreement, while stances on other issues reﬂected divergent opinions or involved a range
of individual variation in motives. This approach also allowed for collection and
comparison of basic demographic data, such as age, total number of Wikipedia edits, and
how long the respondent had been editing Wikipedia. Because a small, self-selected
convenience sample was used, the results are not representative of editors on the English
Wikipedia, much less editors in other languages (Pfeil, Zaphiris, & Ang, 2006) or
contributors to other online collaborative projects. This sample of Wikipedians was
intended to contain especially active contributors who were knowledgeable about
Wikipedia and would be able to describe a wide range of activities taking place on the
site. The results should illuminate some of the inner workings of Wikipedia and begin to
describe why individuals give their time and creativity freely to the project, but further

work in this area is needed using random samples of editors.

3O

Results

As characterized by Bryant et al. (2005), editors would gradually “become
Wikipedian,” initially correcting spelling, grammar, or factual errors in articles they have
read or used for reference. This ﬁnding was conﬁrmed by the respondents here. While
some of the interviewed users did not begin editing articles until a year or more after they
started using Wikipedia as a resource, respondents typically reported that they would be
begin editing within a few months, or even immediately.

Perhaps the most universal ﬁnding was that editing Wikipedia was regularly
predicated by interest in atopic of intense personal interest. Interviewees reported
beginning editing articles because of an interest in their hometown, nationality, academic
discipline, military unit, religion, favorite sport, or an existing hobby like American Civil
War or Cold War history, along with a desire to improve the Wikipedia articles relating
to that topic or to share their knowledge and expertise. This is in line with Bimber, et
al.’s (2005) view of collective action in the contemporary media space as a type of
boundary crossing, in which personal information or activity becomes public through the
low costs of sharing on the Internet. This can also be characterized by Olson’s
description of privileged groups, in that the personal incentives for creating the content
already existed. Now there are low-cost means of making those private goods public.
Assuming the barriers to edit Wikipedia are sufﬁciently low, there is little cost involved
in sharing existing personal or professional expertise in an area. It should be noted that
sharing this knowledge does require proactive steps in actually writing article content or
hunting down sources, in contrast to other boundary crossing activities which are more

automatic and require no creativity, though.

31

Sharing this sort of information with Wikipedia is also a way to advocate for
one’s own interests by improving the amount and quality of coverage on the topic,
though this will lead to opposition from others if an editor is pushing for non-neutral,
coverage, especially of a controversial topic or an ideology. Some of the editors began in
order to correct perceived bias in articles or because they felt they had knowledge that
was lacking from the articles. One respondent saw the emphasis on editing driven by
personal interests as the major advantage of Wikipedia over traditional encyclopedias like
the Britannica or Encarta:

I don’t want to go to Encyclopedia Britannica and read an article about model

trains by a guy who was getting paid to write it. Today’s he’s writing about

model trains, tomorrow’s he’s going to be writing Model T’s, you see what I

mean? I’d rather read an article by a guy who’s really crazy about model trains.
This approach is facilitated by the modularity of the encyclopedia and by the existence of
WikiProjects, groups of users with a shared interest in articles on a particular topic.
WikiProjects are devoted to a single broad topic, and consist of a collection of pages
where interested editors can notify others of articles in need of particular changes, discuss
issues like “Neutral point of view” as it relates to their topic, develop templates and other
ways of creating consistency between articles, and otherwise coordinate their actions to
improve articles about the speciﬁc topic they care about. In addition to the emphasis on
sharing one’s existing knowledge, several respondents described the research involved in
cleaning up articles and properly sourcing them as a way to learn more about a subject,
whether an existing interest or a new topic they had a passing curiosity in:

I contribute mainly because I like to learn about things myself. When I write

articles, I have to research the subject, and the result of this is an increased
awareness and education on the subject.

32

While a few editors continued to work solely on areas they have a personal afﬁnity for,
and remain in a niche space, others described a gradual process of beginning to take an
interest in broader editing issues and the inner works of the project.

Other reasons offered for why individuals began to edit the encyclopedia include
the notoriety of the site, a conviction that the project was “on to something,” the ease of
editing and instantaneous appearance of changes, and developing one’s writing skills. A
few explicitly stated feeling an obligation to reciprocate; they used Wikipedia as a
reference, so, in the words of one editor, they were bound to “put some water back in the
well.” The online encyclopedia’s notoriety in press coverage and especially in Google
rankings made the project more credible and meaningﬁrl to users, and therefore they saw
it as something worth contributing to.

Notably, several respondents reported ﬁnding the initial learning curve for editing
a bit challenging, but short. Others also expressed their concern that the editing interface
(which relies on a simple markup language), automated processes, and policies (which
are often abbreviated) are intimidating to new users. A few respondents were involved in
actually welcoming new users, and nearly all felt that being open and welcoming to
newcomerswas an important issue. Edits ﬁ'om new users, whether registered or
anonymous, may be treated like vandalism if they run afoul of an editing guideline.
Several interview subjects reported editing as anonymous IP address for quite some time,
not registering until they needed to in order to participate in a policy or article deletion .
debate.

Another universal response was that editing behavior was managed in an ad hoc

fashion. Editing of articles continued to be based on personal “interest,” which could

33

mean one’s perennial favorite topics, areas of passing curiosity, or articles stumbled upon
while browsing the site. Several described the hyperlinked nature of an online
encyclopedia as an aid in ﬁnding articles to edit; every article leads to many others of
potential interest. Average editors, not just administrators, took interest in behind the
scenes work. Nearly all users would engage in behaviors like reverting vandalism,
submitting nonsensical or non-notable articles for deletion, commenting on articles up for
deletion, commenting on requests for administrator status, discussing policy on the
appropriate talk pages, deleting or sourcing unveriﬁed statements, copyediting articles,
mediating conﬂicts, and monitoring pages like “Recent changes” or noticeboards for
potential vandalism or editor disputes. Just a few respondents did not involve themselves
in this sort of maintenance behavior, preferring-to focus on creating content in their areas
of interest. Some interview subjects saw the maintenance-type duties as part of their
responsibility as a Wikipedian and a way of protecting the project from threats, while
others described the activities as genuinely enjoyable in their own right. One respondent
described the ad hoc nature of choosing what to work on:
If it is an area I have some practical knowledge of, then if I see an article that
lacks references or is poorly written, I'll work on improving it. [. . . .] My work is
really mood dependent and I switch between six different projects that I am a
member of. Some days 1 don't feel like doing a lot of research, so I participate in
discussions of ongoing issues or helping others deal with abusive editors and
related issues.
Striking a balance between these duties and the creation of content was seen as a way of
maintaining variety and preventing burnout. Because of the distributed nature of
Wikipedia, in which thousands contribute to articles in all sorts of ways, one can always

move on and let others work on an article, so the ad hoc management of activity makes

sense and doesn’t amount to free-riding in practice. And, of course, the general lack of

34

centralized authority means that duties are never assigned, though editors use tools like
noticeboards as ways of making sure that priority issues receive attention. The ﬂexibility
afforded to users — they can work on whatever they want, whenever they want — makes it
a very different kind of labor, or even volunteerism. Respondents consistently reported
that their levels of contribution over time to Wikipedia were largely dependent on their
amount of free time away from commitments “in real life,” either professionally or
personally. When asked about Citizendium, a rival fork of Wikipedia that places an
emphasis on experts and control, respondents were skeptical about the interest of
professional experts on topics in volunteering their time to a free, open source
encyclopedia with a meaningful level of commitment.
Identity on Wikipedia

Reputation was an important part of editing activity of Wikipedia, in a way that
was integrated into the underlying structure of the project. While there is no true sense of
authorship for articles, every article’s edit history retains a permanent log of who made
. what edits to the article. There is enough of a sense of ownership of articles that
respondents would keep close track of articles they had started or contributed to via their
watchlists (the watchlist is a tool built into the MediaWiki software that allows a user to
monitor changes to all pages of interest to them). Only a single interview subject rejected
any notion of “ownership” of articles when asked about recognition for his work. Editors
interact and get to know each other through the behind-the-scenes discussion on article
talk and user talk pages, developing reputation through repeated interaction. Requests for
administrator status result in a period of public commentary where editors weigh on the

merits of the candidate’s work and activity on the site, so reputation matters for those

35

who aspire to become administrators. There are strong rules against the use of more than
one usemame (“sockpuppetry”) and the use of a single account by more than one
individual.

An editor’s sense of identity and reputation was largely represented by their user
page, an editable wiki article for each user that provides identiﬁcation, credentialing, and
surprisingly playful user expression. User pages have their own talk pages, which were
described as an important setting for discussion and interaction on Wikipedia. Every
respondent reported using a user page, with varying combinations of biography, lists of
interests, lists of activities and afﬁliations on Wikipedia, and editing, reference, or
administrative tools presented on the page. Many also made use of “userboxes,” small
identifying icons that range from the serious (“This user is able to contribute with an
intermediate level of Spanish”) to the humorous or trivial (“This user’s favorite color is
green”). These allow for personalization of user pages and allow Wikipedians to learn
more about each other, strengthening the sense of individual identities. While reputation
did not appear to be an overly competitive enterprise on Wikipedia, there is a well-
publicized list of editors with the highest counts. Edit counts were not generally seen as
especially meaningful, however, because adding a comma to an article, adding a large
section of text to an article, and commenting on a talk page would all count equally as a
single edit. Conceivably, more advanced edit counters could be developed in the future.

The nature of Wikipedia administrators appeared to be an issue of some debate
within the site itself. Many of the respondents, and the administrators themselves,
characterized administrative tools as a “mop and bucket,” while respondents more critical

of the project and its management saw some administrators as elitists, even petty

36

bureaucrats, who were overly invested in the site. As of July 2007, 1,266 Wikipedians
served as administrators (Wikipedia, 2007b). Administrative capabilities give these
editors more latitude in ﬁghting vandalism and managing editor disputes, through
capabilities like putting protection or semi-protection on pages, or banning users. Those
functions could certainly be prone to abuse, but respondent consensus (even among the
critical) was that most administrators were excellent, with a small few who had large
egos or were uncooperative. Administrators are selected by the community, through a
nomination, commentary, and consensus process. They usually have high edit counts,
which a few respondents cited as a reason, along with the selection process, why most
administrators were effective, collaborative types. The administrator status is one of the
few means by which longstanding, invested members of the community are rewarded or
privileged in Wikipedia.

Not all respondents had interest in serving as administrators, either due to the
workload, lack of interest in doing even more “custodial” type work, or because they saw
it as a thankless task. One editor did state that becoming an administrator was a goal of
his. Regardless of whether they become administrators or not, nearly all editors engaged
in meta functions, like repairing vandalism and engaging in policy discussions, and
expanded their involvement to include articles and issues unrelated to their initial areas of
interest, as they “became Wikipedian.” A few editors reported occasionally using the
“Random article” link just to ﬁnd something new to read and edit. Several of the
administrators interviewed noted that they did not edit articles and contribute content as

frequently as they did when they were simply editors, either because administrative

37

duties crowded out time for writing, or because they found the behind-the-scenes work of
ﬁghting vandals, mediating conﬂict, and shaping policy more compelling.

One way in which editing by Wikipedians was rewarded was when high quality
articles received “Featured article” status and appear on the front page of Wikipedia for
that language. There are also is also daily recognition for work through “Featured
picture” status and an article’s inclusion in “In the news,” “On this day. . .” and “Did you
know...” While most users only had been heavily involved with a few featured articles at
most, they were well aware if an article of “theirs” had been featured (partially because
articles must apply for featured status.) Other forms of recognition that provided positive
reinforcement were “barnstars,” informal awards that editors can give each other for
especially meaningful contributions, and the even more informal and transitory incentive
of receiving a “thank you” ﬁom an editor on one’s talk page. Many editors reported
ﬁnding thank you notes as especially encouraging and motivating, even more so than
featured work or bamstars. In general, there seemed to be a limited or at least very
informal system for recognizing and rewarding long term or productive editors, or
making reputation tangible to the community.

Enablers: Community, Technology, and Policy

Nearly all editors responded positively when asked how they socialize on
Wikipedia. There appeared to be general consensus around a piece of conventional
wisdom that a community must exist to support writing Wikipedia, but the community
shouldn’t come ﬁrst. There was awareness on the part of respondents that unconstructive
socialization was frowned upon by the majority of other Wikipedians. Several noted that

userboxes, for example, have been criticized by a small few as being a waste of energy,

38

and almost MySpace-ish. Socialization tended to take the form of discussion of articles
and policies, but there remained room for more light-hearted behavior, as exempliﬁed by
the customization and tone of many user pages. Most on-topic discussion as socialization
would take place on talk pages for articles, users, and the “Wikipedia namespace,” a
section of articles, all beginning with “WP:” that are devoted to explaining policies,
providing tools, and other behind-the-scenes activities (including some humorous pages)
that need a centralized location separate from the encyclopedia articles. Additionally,
many of the very active editors reported using IRC channels for socialization, discussion,
and sharing information on vandalism activity. Wikipedians would also exchange email
with other editors they worked with frequently, or if they were involved in a project or
conﬂict. Lastly, Wikipedia provides numerous mailing lists, some private for smaller
groups, and some public and very general. The mailing lists generally consist of
discussion of current issues on Wikipedia, and relevant policies. Views on the nature of
the community tended to fall into three categories: about half saw a healthy, cohesive
community of Wikipedia as a whole, while others saw an increasingly fragmented
community based around niches or even cliques, and several discounted the
meaningfulness or questioned the existence of any real sense of community on the site.

The presence of a community built around the writing of an encyclopedia was
cited by users as an enabling characteristic of Wikipedia. It would provide support in
collaboratively improving content, and was capable of resolving disputes that may arise
over articles. A respondent described the community’s ﬁrnction:

The community is very supportive within itself, helping users who need it and
giving a sense of accomplishment to you for your work.

39

The other two enabling aspects described by users were policy, to the extent that it was
easy to understand and ﬂexible enough to meet demands, and the technology: the
enabling characteristics of the software behind Wikipedia. The project utilizes
MediaWiki software, one of several types of open source wiki software. The ease of use
was the ﬁrst thing many of the respondents mentioned when asked what features enabled
their ability to contribute. From the “edit this page” link on every article, to the
instantaneousness of changes, the wiki software itself was generally considered by
respondents to be a marvel and a driving force behind the project’s success. There are
some notable limitations on the MediaWiki software — its lack of WYSIWYG editing, for
example -— but it was generally commended by editors. Talk pages for articles and user
pages, edit histories, and watchlists were core features that most users made extensive use
of. MediaWiki is ﬂexible to an extent; several respondents praised the addition of in-text
references that had been added. Beyond the software, users described an abundance of
tools, policies, and initiatives on Wikipedia that enabled them, like “Recent changes,”
noticeboards, namespace articles, and more advanced tools like J avascript consoles for
monitoring vandalism. The varied combinations of tools respondents described using
suggested a very individualized approach to toolkits, so that Wikipedia’s diverse and
decentralized conventions make sense.

Interviewed Wikipedians felt that disputes over articles and practices were
inevitable to an extent, because of the character of the project: trying to create
encyclopedia articles with a “neutral” perspective by letting anyone make additions,
changes, or challenges to the content. Editors observed that conﬂict was more common

and intense when dealing with obviously contentious topics, e. g. abortion or the Israeli-

40

Palestinian conﬂict. Respondents were divided, however, over the quality over those
types of articles. Some saw them as proof that Wikipedia works, while others felt that
controversial topics were one of Wikipedia’s weak spots in coverage. The majority of
editors had been involved in a couple major conﬂicts, or “edit wars,” at some point,
ranging from controversial issues to minutia about word choice or formatting in articles
on far more harmonious topics. Many respondents described avoidance as their principle
approach towards conﬂict. Either they felt that their time was best spent moving on
elsewhere or expected that others would come in behind them and be more effective in
negotiating the article’s direction. One respondent described the process from his
perspective:

I try, and succeed, to avoid edit wars over content disputes, but I occasionally do

get involved with them over issues of censoring or otherwise drastically altering

an article without consensus. These tend to be easy to defuse, as there is always a

sizeable majority who either don’t want the material or if they do, want it

discussed ﬁrst.
A common piece of advice was to “walk away” and cool off if one became embroiled in
dispute. Several respondents described this as a negative outcome, however; good, level-
headed editors were eventually chased out by point-of-view pushers who are more
persistent and aggressive. Policies like a ban on reverting another editor’s work more
than three times in a 24-hour period were designed to prevent escalation of disagreement,
though many solutions to conﬂict (the various levels of mediation and arbitration put in
place) seemed designed to be responsive to conﬂict rather than preventative.

The transparency of Wikipedia was frequently cited as a fundamental attribute of

the site; every edit and discussion comment is preserved in an article’s history, which

certainly had an effect on the way conﬂict occurs and is managed. When asked about

41

conﬂict, editors often saw it as a necessary part of the process of creating neutral articles,
so there may be a sense on Wikipedia that measures to prevent conﬂict would discourage
editing. One ofﬁcial rule that afﬁrms this idea is “Be bold.” A common prediction
among respondents was that Wikipedia would move towards using stable versions for
volatile articles, with editable versions available behind the stable versions presented for
general viewing.

Interviewee responses often reﬂected a ﬁrm grasp of Wikipedia’s policies and
guidelines. Policies would either be pointed out in response to a question, either as an
example or explanation. Also, responses to a particular question from different editors
would consistently reﬂect established user consensus or conventional wisdom on
Wikipedia. Policies are disseminated through devoted pages on the Wikipedia
namespace, or by editors that invoke or explain a policy on a talk page (with a link back
to the namespace article, of course). Numerous articles exist that summarize Wikipedia
policies or introduce newcomers to the project, which is a ﬂexible and redundant, but
potentially confusing, approach. The most succinct statement of Wikipedia’s guiding
policies is “The Five Pillars” (Wikipedia, 2007c) which summarize Wikipedia policy and
include some of the most important principles:

1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

2. Wikipedia has a neutral point of view.

3. Wikipedia is ﬁee content.

4. Wikipedia has a code of conduct.

5. Wikipedia does not have ﬁrm rules.

Ofﬁcially, there are 42 policies, including crucial rules like “No original research” and

“Veriﬁability.” Policies have simple titles which are often abbreviated for quick

reference, and they are delineated in various levels of detail in the Wikipedia namespace.

42

While Wikipedia does not have ﬁrm rules (one is actually “Ignore all rules”), they do
play a very important role in setting norms and providing criteria for conﬂict resolution,
so editors must learn the rules in order to be effective collaborators and in order to avoid
sanctions. Several respondents expressed concern that Wikipedia rules may be a barrier
to potential or new users, if rules are perceived as too complicated or contradictory.
Perceptions of Wikipedia

When asked why they continue to contribute to Wikipedia, respondents typically
pointed to both a personal satisfaction they received from editing and identiﬁcation with
the values and goals of the site. Editors described an ideological commitment to the
project’s open model for creating content and sharing it with others. For example, one
respondent stated when asked about continuing to contribute:

I like the ideals of the project. Human knowledge should be available to

everyone, regardless of ability to pay or location in the world. Similarly, the

ability to contribute to that base of knowledge should be open to everyone that

wants to do so constructively. As long as Wikipedia allows that, I will happily

help with it.
Other recurring themes were Wikipedia’s prominence, the scope of the project, the ability
to share information with others, reciprocity because they use Wikipedia, a sense of
fulﬁllment, investment in the pet topics that drove them in the ﬁrst place, the ability to
develop writing and discussion skills through collaborating with others, a sense of
belonging, the fact that there is so much work yet to be done on the site, and the idea that
the work could never be “owned” because of the GNU licensing. Editors saw Wikipedia

as an opportunity not only to sharpen their writing skills, but also to develop

collaborative skills. Describing it as a way to learn skills for engaging with other people

43

online, using techniques like addressing individuals by name, one respondent said about
Wikipedia:

You develop skills that are very much needed, because most of our

communication today is though email, or through blogs and whatever you are

writing. Your ability to address people on the human side as much as the

intellect, and respect them as a person, comes through when you write. That is

really attractive, because you are learning new skills in an environment in which

you can actually do it and practice in a way you cannot do it anywhere else.
Interviewees also saw editing as a powerful learning tool for themselves. If they had the
need to work on articles beyond their existing knowledge base, editors would go out of
their way to research new topics, ﬁnding facts and sources for inclusion into articles.
Several Wikipedians even reported going as far as picking up books from their library for
the purpose of adding information and sources not available online.

Editors expressed a sense of self—efﬁcacy by describing their own knowledge,
background, or skills that enabled them to be productive contributors. The emphasis on
editing articles of interest to them implied that users felt they were making unique or
meaningﬁrl contributions. However, respondents were rarely defensive of their work,
because everything on Wikipedia is potentially subject to review and alteration.
Respondents were not defensive of their “turf,” either. When asked about editors who
had similar interests or experience, nearly all respondents saw those types as editors they
were most likely to collaborate effectively with. One proliﬁc editor and administrator
was discouraged, however, when articles he and others had improved to “Featured” status
quality were "ﬁddled to death by the masses" after being featured and actually ended up
in poorer shape. This resembled the previously described effect of aggressive point-of-

view pushers chasing out good editors who became frustrated, suggesting collective

action, or at least the presence of more “eyeballs,” was not always successful. In addition

to self-efﬁcacy stemming from personal expertise, editors also appeared to feel
empowered by the technological and organization tools at their disposal.

Respondents were not in agreement over what the weakest sections of Wikipedia
coverage were, but some drew a connection between weaknesses and perceived
systematic bias in Wikipedia’s user base, asserting that there was excellent coverage of
popular culture, current events, and technology topics at the expense of historical,
humanities, and global topics. Several editors felt that the site’s user base was overly
representative of the highly educated, technically adept, and afﬂuent, and that this biased
the perspective of the Encyclopedia as a whole. Two editors noted:

The historical content, and the humanities content more broadly, is universally

weak (with the exception of the ever popular military history). It will be a long

time before comes up to an acceptable level.

Wikipedia is still substantially incomplete outside the main interests of 15-30 year
old male computer professionals. Much work remains to be done.

Wikipedians were quick to stress that the encyclopedia is a work in progress, and as long
as there were areas with less than ideal treatment, there would be strong incentives for
individuals to improve them. Some respondents expressed concern over a dispute
between “deletionists,” administrators and other editors who would make an effort to
remove articles on arguably non-notable topics, and “inclusionists,” those who saw no
harm in allowing non-encyclopedic content to remain if someone might ﬁnd it useful. At
1.8 million articles on the English Wikipedia alone, as of July 2007, Wikipedia is broader
in scope than any traditional encyclopedia, so determining the boundaries of notable
encyclopedia-worthy topics is certainly a discussion worth having.

One area where consensus did exist, however, was that biographies of living

persons on Wikipedia were a serious problem. Biographies were described as prone to

45

unsourced negative statements, although a policy was created to speciﬁcally address this
weakness and several others following the Seigenthaler controversy in 2005 (Haﬁrer,
2006; Seelye, 2005). When asked about the future of Wikipedia, the biggest concern
among respondents was that the encyclopedia and Wikimedia Foundation were
vulnerable to defamation lawsuits. Another perennial threat, especially to Wikipedia’s
reliability, is vandalism. The Wikipedians interviewed were nearly unanimous in their
description of vandalism as “juvenile” behavior from children, the easily amused or
bored, or visitors who wanted to see if their change would really appear. Editors were
not in agreement on the seriousness of the vandalism problem, however. Some stated
that it was “not really an issue” and that there seemed to be plenty of “eager vandal
ﬁghters.” Several respondents enjoyed reverting vandalism or used it as a diversion from
other work. Others saw the constant inﬂux of vandalism as a threat to reliability, and
noted that persistent vandalism in an article discourages editors. These respondents
tended to be in favor of changing Wikipedia to prohibit anonymous editing, which
apparently accounted for the majority of vandalism. Those less concerned about
vandalism maintained that anonymous editing is important to keeping Wikipedia open
and welcoming. ln'any event, accounts or anonymous IP addresses that commit repeat
vandalism would get banned, and multiple tools were described for monitoring vandalism
and encouraging Wikipedians to revert it, including the fact that everyedit is recorded
and reverting pages to previous version is a simple process.

Several administrators interviewed made the claim that Wikipedia is something
that shouldn’t work in theory, but does in practice. Others noticed that Citizendium and

other rival wiki or encyclopedia projects online face competing with a substantial ﬁrst-

46

mover advantage for Wikipedia. These suggest that in many ways, Wikipedia’s success
may be due to a perfect storm of factors coming together: the inherent characteristics of
an encyclopedia (a wide-ranging collection of sourced summaries of topics), the
simplicity and transparency of the MediaWiki software, the decentralized and open
community, policies, and management that have emerged on the site, and a strong
network effect.
Discussion

Research Question #1 asked, “What technological and social features enable the
Wikipedia’s survival as a public good and provide individual incentives for
contribution?” The enabling features described by the users interviewed here might be
best categorized as technological, organizational, and social, because much of
Wikipedia’s organization and policy are not dictated by the technology but have
developed in response to user need. Some of the technological features that appear to
facilitate the creation of a public good through collective action are the ease of use, which
reduces transaction costs to the level where individuals are able to add information
simply and in an ad hoc fashion, and transparency, which keeps vandals and content
disputes manageable and allows users to make smart decisions about editing. The
enabling organizational features described by Wikipedians were the policies created and
enforced by the editing community, the ﬂexibility and redundancy in the presentation of
policies and in activities like ﬁghting vandals, and the openness and ﬂat hierarchy. The
social features which appear to facilitate collective action are user identity and
reputation, the mediation of disputes over editing by other willing Wikipedians, the sense

of community and belonging on the site, and ideological conviction in Wikipedia’s model

47

and the meaningfulness of its goals. All of these social characteristics have the potential
to provide for a strong sense of reciprocity, or gift economy.

Research Question #2 asked, “How are Wikipedia’s various limitations and
challenges related to public good featuresand social dilemmas?” Perhaps the most
persistent criticism of Wikipedia is the question of its reliability. The dynamic nature of
the content means that direct quotations or references to text from any given article are
not useful, as the text may change. Jimmy Wales and others have argued that Wikipedia
shouldn’t be cited anyway, though many users may mistakenly use Wikipedia as the ﬁnal
(or sufﬁcient) word on a topic. Perhaps a bigger consequence of the dynamism is that
one might encounter ﬂeeting vandalism in an article. Happily, as Ciffolilli (2003)
pointed out, there are strong disincentives to vandalism: Wikipedians are constantly
monitoring for vandalism, and the cost of removing it and restoring damaged content is
incredibly low. Vandalism appears to have a negative effect on the utility of the
encyclopedia in two ways: a reader may encounter it in passing, before an editor has had
a chance to remove it, or a clever vandal will make subtle changes or fake a citation in
order to get their change past editors for a more lengthy period of time, as in prominent
instances of vandalism in Wikipedia articles on both golfer Fuzzy Zoeller and actor
Sinbad. Acts of vandalism by juvenile or ill-intentioned users can be seen as form of
free-riding They are taking advantage of the existence of a prominent public good
(Wikipedia is certainly a more appealing target now than it was in 2003) to amuse
themselves or mock others. While the transaction costs for vandalizing Wikipedia
(because of its openness) are certainly lower than for, say, vandalizing the front page of

the New York Times website, the multiple responsive systems for reverting vandalism

48

and banning vandals makes it unrewarding to vandalize Wikipedia, or very costly to do
so effectively. While having low barriers to contribution is a fundamental attribute of
Wikipedia, and necessary for bringing in more effective editors, higher barriers would
deter vandals and some point-of-view pushers. Finding the right balance is difﬁcult, as
reﬂected in the disagreement by editors over whether allowing non-registered users
(anonymous IP addresses) to edit should continue.

Wikipedia, as a collaborative encyclopedia, strives to be neutral in tone, without
editorial voice. For our purposes here, we can simply hold this questionable notion of
“Neutral point of view” as an assumption and ask if collective action is able to produce
articles that adhere to the site’s notion of neutrality. A common form of free-riding as
described by respondents was that individuals would push their own points of view in
their edits, disregarding the “Neutral point of view” policy (either through unsourced
statements or selective sourcing). This can be characterized as free-riding, because
individuals are not engaging in the behavior expected, cooperating to meet a group goal,
but rather using the public good that is Wikipedia to try to further their own ends.
Additionally, when editors are driven out of an area by frustration with point-of-view
pushers, they are free-riding as well — relying on others to come in behind them and
continue the ﬁght. To the extent that there are enough Wikipedians interested in doing so
for the given article, the public good will still be provided. Interview respondents did
note that they would often stand their ground and request the assistance of third party
mediators, which alleviates the social dilemma. Afﬁnity for Wikipedia appears to lead
users to do this kind of mediation work, or edit on topics that are not necessarily of

passionate interest to them but may need assistance. And, as with other problematic

49

areas, policy and organizational structure has been developed to address editing disputes.
One of the ﬁve pillars of Wikipedia is that there is a code of conduct for editing.
Conﬂicts may be addressed by the various groups of mediators and arbitrators available,
and users can be banned for violating policy.

Much like the possibility of neutrality in articles is questioned, Wikipedia is often
disparaged as “truth by consensus” or an averaging and dumbing down of information.
This remains an argument best examined through other methods, especially content
analysis. The issue at stake here is whether consensus through collaborative writing in a
wiki can be achieved and an encyclopedia can be written through this form of online
collective action. Additionally, Wikipedia is criticized for placing emphasis on particular
types of content, especially popular culture, at the expense of other areas. Provided the
project continues to ﬂourish, increased recognition of Wikipedia’s signiﬁcance will
strengthen the network effect, which should lead a wider range of users to the site, which
in turn would mean wider and fuller coverage. However, this can only happen if
transaction costs are kept sufﬁciently low or reduced even further, meaning that
improvements to the MediaWiki software (e. g. WYSIWYG editing) should take place
and policies and organization should be conveyed more clearly to newcomers. It is fair to
ask at what point in time Wikipedia will have sufficient depth in its coverage. The
breadth of the topics covered is not matched by the detail, with many underdeveloped
articles throughout the site. Certainly, creating such a large encyclopedia and giving it
sufﬁcient balance and depth is not a task that can be done instantly. Six years in,
Wikipedians emphasized in interviews that the site is a work in progress. Comparisons

are not helpful in detemrining the amount of collective action versus free-riding taking

50

place, because nothing like Wikipedia has been attempted before, and the site certain
surpasses any other online volunteer projects in being able to successﬁrl turn out material.

Questions remain about the general quality of writing on Wikipedia, however.
Duguid’s (2006) analysis suggested that editing takes place at too granular of a level
(editors focus on a particular section, sentence, or fact), leading to inconsistent or
redundant content in articles. He also made described a strong tendency on Wikipedia to
use contemporary information or sources to extrapolate to the past, which is an effect of
the reliance on web-based or contemporary sources. Several respondents described going
to lengths to use print sources for articles they were working on, which would be positive
trend were it to become widespread, though this is a high-cost activity. Duguid’s
conclusion is that bad edits drive out good edits (a play on Gresham’s Law, which one
respondent actually used as an analogy, too). In contrast, analysis by Wilkinson and
Huberman correlated high edit counts and article quality, but only for featured articles,
which does not address the question of whether highly edited, poor quality articles are
abundant. Future work in this area is needed, using content analysis and tools like the
“history ﬂows” of Viégas et al., to demonstrate whether editing practices are leading to
quality encyclopedia articles.

Much like barriers protecting against poor edits and vandalism, a delicate balance
must be struck in rewarding reputable users with authority. Too much hierarchy would
damage the ﬂat, egalitarian nature of the Wikipedia commons that appears to have been
so successful, but privileges and structure are important means of managing activity
(Ostrom, 1990, p. 90). Administrators and others who engage in meta functions appear to

place an emphasis on those maintenance behaviors often at the expense of article writing,

51

but the administrative duties are clearly essential to the project’s success, and the tasks
seem to be an appealing and rewarding activity for a substantial number of individuals.
Ostrom characterized the provision of rules as a potential second-order dilemma, and
stated that group members require involvement in the rules governing the system. The
dilemma seems to be surmounted, to the extent that Wikipedia rules continue to be
functional and foster the growth of quality articles. It is signiﬁcant to ﬁnd that most
respondents, not just administrators, were involved in policy discussion to some extent,
and that they found it an interesting and engaging activity that was an alternative or
supplement to editing, much like vandal ﬁghting. There also seemed to be an inherent,
' almost navel-gazing kind of interest in how and why Wikipedia works, and how it can be
improved. This is likely the result of the ideological commitment to the project paired
with the enjoyment Wikipedians ﬁnd in activities related to self-governance. Future
empirical work is needed to determine how invested and efﬁcacious less active
Wikipedians feel in the policy creation process. An additional concern is that as
Wikipedians broaden their activity on the site, they may write” or mediate on topics that
they do not know enough about to avoid making serious factual mistakes.

Research Question #3 asked, “What do the public good features speciﬁc to
Wikipedia imply about its long-term viability?” An easily overlooked aspect of
Wikipedia is the simple fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The nature of the
enterprise has made successful collective action a distinct possibility. The utility of the
site makes reciprocity a powerful force, a neutral and veriﬁable account of each article
topic provides a goal and framework for contributing, an encyclopedia has massive scope

but is highly modular, and enthusiasts seem to be especially attracted to articles on the

52

subjects they are interested in. This has resulted in the systematic emphasis on popular
culture, current events, and technological topics, however. While wikis are being used
for applications from online fandom communities to knowledge management by
businesses, Wikipedia remains the shining example of the wiki’s potential. For example,
there are several other wiki projects under banner of the Wikimedia Foundation that are
not nearly as successful as their sister project, Wikipedia. Wikiversity lacks the
modularity of an encyclopedia, while Wikinews entails high cost newsgathering
activities, and Wikitionary has limited intrinsic appeal as an activity.

In describing traditional collective action, Olson (1965) asserted that larger
groups would be less successful because free-riding was more tempting as one’s share of
the good became a smaller fraction, and because coordination becomes more difﬁcult. In
online settings, however, larger groups appear to be more successful. In Wikipedia, if
you free ride on one article or opt not to make a particular edit, there are enough users
that it is probable that someone else will provide instead. As Bimber et al. (2005) noted,
the work of online collective action has been split up into smaller pieces, so that deciding
to ﬂee ride is no longer a discrete choice, but a series of ongoing opportunities to share.
The scale and openness of Wikipedia and the organizing power of the wiki appear
sufﬁciently potent enough to make ad hoc, unorganized contribution an acceptable way
to contribute to the provision of this particular public good. However, it is conceivable
that largeness may have a negative impact on the importance of identity and reputation,
as editors become less likely to have encountered each other before. The sense of
community has the potential to become less cohesive and more fragmented as the site

grows.

53

The development of the wiki was groundbreaking; it offers an ease of use and
reduced costs for creating and sharing content on the web that is only rivaled by social
networks. Wikipedia has successfully lowered the cost of contributing to the point
where, for a signiﬁcant number of people, that cost is outweighed by the beneﬁts
received. The question remains, what are those beneﬁts that, for thousands of
Wikipedians, are outweighing the cost of contributing? Answers to the general question
of personal incentive and motivation are suggested by the interview data: personal
interest in topics coupled with low costs of sharing, the reciprocity provided by the site
(which is also furthered by the network effect), the skills developed by contributing, and
the enjoyment that is gained through intellectual stimulation, the sense of community, and
the challenge of coordination. These are the reasons that the interviewed editors gave for
why they choose to contribute to Wikipedia. As with other activities, like free/open
source software development, the combination and relative importance of these rewards
appear to vary. Ghosh (2005) and Lakhani and Wolf (2005) described similar categories
of motivation for contributors to free/open source software: social, personal use, career,
and ideological motivations. Career motivations would not characterize Wikipedians, but
social motivations are seemingly evident, personal use entails editing on topics of
personal interest, reciprocity, and developing skills, while ideological motivations were
suggested as well: belief in both the importance of free and open content and the
meaningfulness of Wikipedia as a resource. While reputation remains an important
component of the collaborative process, Wikipedia is most noticeably distinct from
‘ﬁ'ee/open source software development in that it lacks career related concerns, or

“signaling,” as a motivation to contribute.

54

In many ways, Wikipedia ﬁts the description by Bimber et al. of collective action
in contemporary online media. Reduced costs make the sharing of information
previously existing in a personal space possible, so that it crosses the boundary into
public space. Wikipedia editors are largely sharing their personal interests and
knowledge with others when they edit. However, Wikipedia does not conform to the
“boundary crossing” description as fully as other Web 2.0 entities like MySpace’s social
networking, F lickr’s photo sharing, or del.icio.us’ social bookmarking, because editing an
encyclopedia is a far more active process, involving the creation of content that typically
did not exist before, and Wikipedia entails collaboration not necessary for projects like
Flickr and del.icio.us that are built around aggregation rather than cooperation.
Additionally, the contributions of Wikipedia editors are likely to have limited utility to
them because they are sharing basic knowledge about a topic. While an editor might
refer back to a page they worked on, especially if others have'made signiﬁcant
contributions as well, the Wikipedia model relies far more on reciprocity, as an
encyclopedia has great utility. Not only is an encyclopedia obviously useful by its very
nature as a reference work, but its modularity means that that the utility for any individual
is unique and varied. Users will ﬁnd articles that others have created on many different
topics they aren’t familiar with or need to refer to the most useful.

In some ways, Wikipedia more closely resembles the traditional model of
collective action articulated by Olson, where users must choose to act based on personal
incentive, and organizational structure is typically necessary to achieve collective goals.
Wikipedia as a whole is an intermediate group, where individuals have strong incentives

but organization and rule-making are necessary for coordination. Individual articles may

55

be the product of a cooperative intermediate group, or of a privileged group or individual
that had existing incentives to create the good and simply crossed the private/public
boundary through low transaction costs and a sense of reciprocity. Yet Wikipedia as a
whole may also be seen as a privileged good, in that a small group of thousands has
sufﬁcient incentives to create the resources and share it with the rest of the world. For
these reasons, Wikipedia ﬁts both the traditional and reconceptualized notions of
collective action. In comparison, Wikipedia’s intellectual precedent of free/open source
software development also resembles both models of collective action. It is a group of
laborers choosing to come together to create a product, but is also hackers sharing
improvements and alterations that they are producing for their own personal use.

The present study is limited ﬁrst and foremost by the use of a non-random
sample. Self-selection bias and most respondents’ high levels of activity and
involvement with the site limit the generalizability of responses. There are also biases
expected from interviewing American contributors to the English Wikipedia rather than a
broader representation of Wikipedia editors. Finally, the nature of the qualitative-
interviews conducted and the self—reported behaviors and attitudes involved limit the
study as well.

Future empirical work is necessary to fully describe the performance and
limitations of collective action on Wikipedia. Further work is needed on the production
function, and how less integrated or active editors understand and make use of or even
understand identity, norms, and other organizing features on Wikipedia. For example, is
there a threshold at which editors are likely to create and make use of a user page?

Perhaps the most pressing need for Wikipedia research at this point is to collect random

56

samples of Wikipedia editors and begin to determine what the demographics and
characteristics of Wikipedians are. Wikipedia is heavily used, but only a small fraction
of those users give back. For what kind of person does the cost/beneﬁt calculus result in
a positive on the beneﬁt side, leading to the decision to edit?

Wikipedia exhibits the requirements needed for successful collective action,
providing strong individual motivations to contribute that overcome costs, and offering
principled yet ﬂexible organization and policy. This is while remaining radically open
and decentralized, exhibiting the characteristics of collective action online, as deﬁned by
the sharing of personal activity with the public sphere through technology that radically
lowers transaction costs. While questions remain about the site’s value as a reference
tool and what it implies about information and gatekeeping authority in the 21St century,
the problems related to the remaining social dilemmas on Wikipedia have the potential to
be solved as the project matures. Whether collective action can address these challenges
will be an important precedent for collaboration and user-generated content online. The
technology, organization, and community involved have made effective collective action
a reality for Wikipedia and have the potential to advance that action further.

This study suggests that Wikipedia has achieved the success it has because of
both inherent characteristics and constructed systems that have been conducive to
collective action. Other online projects and communities seeking to apply the Wikipedia
model must assess whether enough of the same or equivalent incentives and structures
exist in their own endeavors, and whether a sufﬁcient number of users will ﬁnd that the
beneﬁts of participating outweigh the costs. Additionally, Wikipedia is an important

point of reference for collective action online because it requires both the active, dynamic

57

organization needed for collective action ofﬂine, and the reduced barriers and ease of
transfer that characterized many user- generated websites. The ﬁndings here reinforce the
literature’s emphasis on overcoming the free-rider problem through both existing
incentives and organizational approaches. These solutions to social dilemmas remain

important, even a new and changing world of decentralized and open information.

58

Appendix: Interview Questions

Name: Age: Gender:

 

Email Address: Phone:

 

Are you a US. Resident? __ Wikipedia Usemame:

 

Dates (MM/YYY Y) of Wikipedia use, as a reader: to

 

 

Dates of Wikipedia use, as a contributor: to

 

 

In a few sentences, brieﬂy summarize your history of Wikipedia activity, including types
of contributions and average frequency.

1. Why did you choose to begin contributing to Wikipedia?

2. Do you utilize a user page?

3. How many edits have you made to date?

4. Do you have special status on Wikipedia (for example, administrator)?

5. How many new articles have you created and how many articles have you made major
contributions to?

6. What kinds of contributions do you make to Wikipedia?

7. How do you choose what sorts of changes, additions, or other contributions you will
make?

8. What features of Wikipedia aid your ability to contribute, or encourage you to do so?
9. How do you utilize talk pages, histories, and other tools?

10. How many articles are on your watchlist, or do you otherwise monitor?

11. Have you had a page of yours featured or received other recognition for your work?

12. What administrative or “meta” functions do you perform?

59

13. How do you socialize or interact with other Wikipedians? How would you describe
the sense of community?
14. Have there been points at which your frequency or type of contributions changed
signiﬁcantly? What led to those changes?
15. Why do you continue to contribute to Wikipedia? Do you see yourself continuing
indeﬁnitely?
16. What “edit wars” or similar conﬂiCts have been involved in, what was your behavior,
and what is your attitude towards conﬂict over articles?
17. What major shortcomings have you encountered on Wikipedia, in terms of content?
What corrections and additions were you able to make? What is your attitude towards
underdeveloped articles or sections?
18. What are your attitudes towards those Wikipedians/users who:

Are very active contributors?

Act as administrators for the site?

Are similar to yourself in experience or area of interest?

You’ve had conﬂict with over articles?

Make marginal contributions?

Are newbies?

Vandalize?

Are only readers rather than contributors?
19. What do you think of restrictions placed on editing for sensitive topics or those prone
to vandalism?

20. What is important to you about Wikipedia?

60

21. What do you think of Digital Universe and Citizendium? Do they present a challenge
or threat to Wikipedia?

22. What do you think the future of Wikipedia might be?

23. What other wikis or open sites do you contribute to?

24. What do you think the ﬁrture of user-generated content/open-source projects might
be?

25. Are there any new or occasional contributors whose work you've noticed, that I might

be able to recruit for this study?

61

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