Why Do People Write for Wikipedia? Incentives to Contribute to Open-Content Publishing

When people learn that we have spoken to individuals who spend up to 30 hours a week volunteering their time to research and write for an open-content encyclopedia, we often hear the same question: “Why do they do it?“ The fact that this encyclopedia does not provide bylines to credit authors for their hard work makes the scenario still less fathomable. Two rounds of interviews with 22 volunteer encyclopedia writers in the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005 revealed that, in some respects, the incentive system that motivates contributions to the opencontent encyclopedia Wikipedia resembles that of the scientific community. Like scientists, contributors to Wikipedia seek to collaboratively identify and publish true facts about the world. Research on the sociology of science provides a useful touchstone for considering the incentive systems embedded in the technology and culture of online communities of collaborative authorship. In this paper we describe some of our findings in the context of Latour and Woolgar’s seminal work on the incentive systems that motivate publishing scientists. We suggest that minimizing reliance on “hard coded,“ stratified user privileges and providing indicators of engagement in desirable activities can help support the growth of incentive economies in online communities.