A social capital perspective on meta-knowledge contribution and social computing

Recent years have seen a substantial growth of social computing, where large numbers of individual users share content with others in online communities. Social computing systems have thus led to a profusion of highly heterogeneous data, further exacerbating the traditional problems of knowledge sharing. This has made Meta-knowledge (knowledge about knowledge) important and more widely used, as it helps users locate knowledge easily. However, the reasons for people's meta-knowledge contribution in the social computing context and the extent to which this may differ from traditional knowledge contribution remain largely unexplored. This gap is addressed in the present study. Building on social capital theory, and using a combination of survey and independent system data, we explore what affects individual meta-knowledge contribution on Flickr, a popular photo-sharing service.