Why do we contribute to Wikipedia? Here’s a report of a survey. I add my additional motivations below:
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By Andy Oram
A recent article titled “What Motivates Wikipedians?” (written by Oded Nov in Communications of the ACM, November 2007, Vol. 50, No. 11, pp. 60-64) attracted my eye because I’ve been doing similar research on why people write computer documentation. Back in June I published the results of a survey that over 350 people filled out. I wanted to see what more rigorous research would turn up.
[…]The article is not available to the general public online [PMR: Closed access I assume], but I can summarize the motivations Nov tested in his survey:
- Altruism and humanitarian concerns
- Responding to requests by friends or attempting to engage in an activity viewed favorably by important others
- Chances to learn new things
- Preparing for a new career or signaling knowledge to potential employers
- Addressing personal problems, such as guilt at being more fortunate than others
- Ego needs and public exhibition of knowledge
- Ideological concerns, such as belief that information should be free
- Fun
This is a pretty comprehensive list of personal reasons for doing something that doesn’t offer any immediate personal payback. But what’s missing from this list? The motivation that means the most to me personally, and probably to many people who write: they actually have something to say!
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But there are lots of urgent social issues where someone feels he or she benefits from other people having the correct facts: political controversies, public health problems whose cures depend on widespread compliance, and so on. In my own field, people are writing computer documentation because they want to promote the software they’re writing or using. The intrinsic motivations in the list may add a bit of extra incentive, but the main goal is to get one’s point of view heard. And the Wikipedia’s fame, along with the high rankings it receives in web searches, ensures that lots of casual web users will read its entries. If you care about people hearing your point of view, you’d better damn well write for Wikipedia.
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PMR: What articles have I started, and why? Here’s my list (I got this from a list of my contributions – is there a list of the pages I have started?):
- Penicillin binding proteins (showing MSc students the value of Wikipedia – Birkbeck MSc in Bioinformatics)
- Carotenoid oxygenase same reason
- Interleukin 7 same reason
- Molecular graphics as a founder member of the Molecular Graphics Society (now MGMS) I felt the history and ethos should be recorded
- Molecular model because I have spent many days making molecular models and I love them and again wish to recapture the history
- Pseudorotation because I love this concept and have written papers on it
- Round-trip format conversion because I really care about preventing semantic loss during data transformations
- Open Data this is perhaps the most important. When I started with the idea of “Open Data” I didn’t know whether the term was in frequent use and so starting a Wikipedia page was the most effective way of finding out. If it already existed under another name, someone would tell me. As it happens it didn’t and the entry was needed because many others have contributed
So – in the most general terms – a fair overlap with the list above. I hope it’s not ego trips. I would add the educational aspect – I think communal preparation of a Wikipedia entry is an amazing class activity. And I’d probably add “attempts to create a community in common agreement on the meaning of a concept”.