Title
Motivational Determinants of Participation Trajectories in Wikipedia.
Abstract
Many digitally mediated peer-production systems allow participants to define their own activities. The challenge in such systems, however, lies in retaining members beyond the first few interactions. To address this problem we must understand who these users are and why they begin to contribute. Importantly, there is scant empirical evidence on how motivations are associated with different trajectories of participation for new participants. Our study addresses this gap by combining a survey of new Wikipedia editors’ motivations with an exploratory analysis of the editors’ activity logs. Using clustering techniques to identify prototypical activity profiles from log data, we observe what motivations are associated with which prototypical activities. We find that new editors’ motivations are predictive of their future activity. In particular our results indicate that reputation, social, enjoyment, and obligation motives differ among editor activity clusters.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
ICWSM
Obligation,Internet privacy,Empirical evidence,Computer science,Cluster analysis,Reputation
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
1
0.35
References 
Authors
6
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Martina Balestra1133.00
Ofer Arazy250230.43
Coye Cheshire322721.21
Oded Nov498463.88