Stacey Kuznetsov
Abstract
This paper aims to explain why people are motivated to contribute to the Wikipedia project. A comprehensive analysis of the motivations of Wikipedians is conducted using the iterative methodology developed by Batya Friedman and Peter Kahn in Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems and co-developed by Nissenbaum and Friedman in Bias in Computer Systems. The Value Sensitive Design (VSD) approach consists of three stages: Empirical Investigation, Conceptual Investigation, and Technical Investigation. During the empirical phase, motivations of the contributors to Wikipedia are identified through analysis of data from two published surveys and a pilot survey conducted at New York University. The underlying values behind these motivations are then defined in the conceptual phase of the study. Finally, a technical investigation is conducted in order to determine how features of the Wiki technology support and facilitate these values.
- Friedman, B., Kahn, P. and Borning, A. "Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems." Forthcoming in P. Zhang & D. Galletta (Eds.), Human-Computer Interaction in Management Information Systems: Foundations. New York: M.E. Sharpe.Google Scholar
- Friedman and H. Nissenbaum, "Bias in Computer Systems", ACM Transactions on Information Systems, July 1996. 330--347 Google ScholarDigital Library
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics, visited April 20, 2006Google Scholar
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians, Visited April 22, 2006. Wikipedia defines Wikipedians as "the people who write and edit articles for Wikipedia."Google Scholar
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian, visited April 20, 2006Google Scholar
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making, "Consensus Decision Making", visited April 30, 2006.Google Scholar
- Friedman, pg. 15Google Scholar
- Friedman, pg. 15Google Scholar
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPOV, "Wikipedia: Neutral Point of View", visited April 30, 2006.Google Scholar
- http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/Final4.htm, "Section 4: Motivations, Expectations, and Orientations of OS/FS Developers", in Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study, Part IV: Survey of Developers, visited April 22, 2006.Google Scholar
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seti_at_home, "SETI@home", visited April 22, 2006.Google Scholar
- http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/polls.html "SETI@home Poll Results", SETI@home, visited April 23, 2006Google Scholar
- http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/motivation.html, "Why people are running SETI@home", accessed through waybackmachine.org because the SETI website was down, visited April 23, 2006. Some notable responses include: "One small step for Man. One giant leap for Mankind." "#1 {find ET for the good of humanity} and to be a part of the biggest collaborative project ever undertaken by mankind" "#1 {find ET for the good of humanity} of course, plus I am very interested in (co-operative) distributed processing" "A combination of keeping my computers productive, finding ET for the good of humanity and proving life thrives out there (the two latter has highest priority)" "A good example of distributed computing"Google Scholar
- Kuznetsov, Stacey, "An Informal Survey of New York University Students", April 2006, pg. 1.Google Scholar
- Kuznetsov, pg. 2.Google Scholar
- Kuznetsov, pg. 3.Google Scholar
- Kuznetsov, pg. 7.Google Scholar
- Kuznetsov, pg. 7.Google Scholar
- Benkler, Yochai and Nissenbaum, Helen. "Commons-Based Peer-Production and Virtue", http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/Benk_Niss_Vir052905.doc, pg. 21, visited April 22, 2006.Google Scholar
- Paraphrased from Benkler and Nissenbaum, pg. 22.Google Scholar
- Trivers, Robert L. "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism", The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 46, March 1971, pg. 45Google ScholarCross Ref
- Trivers, pg. 37.Google Scholar
- Benkler and Nissenbaum, pg. 22.Google Scholar
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_Portal, "Wikipedia:Community Portal", visited April 29, 2006.Google Scholar
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Collaborations, "Wikipedia:Collaborations", visited April 29, 2006.Google Scholar
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates, "Wikipedia: Featured Article Candidates", visited April 30, 2006.Google Scholar
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_a_featured_portal%3F, "Wikipedia: What is a Featured Portal?", visited April 30, 2006.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Motivations of contributors to Wikipedia
Recommendations
Exploring motivations for contributing to open source initiatives
We explore contextual and dispositional correlates of the motivation to contribute to open source initiatives. We examine how the context of the open source project, and the personal values of contributors, are related to the types of motivations for ...
Motivations of Wikipedia content contributors
Rapidly developing web technologies have increased the prevalence of user-generated Internet content. Of the many websites with user-generated content on the Internet, one of the most renowned is Wikipedia, which is the largest multilingual free-content ...
Two-stage approach to named entity recognition using Wikipedia and DBpedia
IMCOM '17: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and CommunicationIn natural language understanding, extraction of named entity (NE) mentions in given text and classification of the mentions into pre-defined NE types are important processes. Most NE recognition (NER) relies on resources such as a training corpus or NE ...
Comments