TY - GEN
T1 - Motivational determinants of participation trajectories in Wikipedia
AU - Balestra, Martina
AU - Arazy, Ofer
AU - Cheshire, Coye
AU - Nov, Oded
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by NSF grant ACI-1322218.
Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84979508814
T3 - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2016
SP - 535
EP - 538
BT - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2016
PB - AAAI press
T2 - 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2016
Y2 - 17 May 2016 through 20 May 2016
ER -