What motivates experts to contribute to Wikipedia? Yan Chen, an economics professor at University of Michigan, ran a field experiment to find out.

Wikipedia is one of the most-visited sites in the world, and for good reason—it’s off-the-charts useful! That's remarkable considering it's created entirely by volunteers. But sometimes, Wikipedia articles can be incomplete or flat wrong because they lack the contributions of experts.

How can we solve this?

This video covers Yan Chen’s field study on what motivates experts to contribute to Wikipedia. Citations? Public acknowledgement? Just asking?

This video is based on the paper:
Motivating Experts to Contribute to Public Goods: A Personalized Field Experiment on Wikipedia by Yan Chen, Rosta Farzan, Robert Kraut, Iman Yeckeh Zaare and Ark Fangzhou Zhang.
http://econ.msu.edu/seminars/docs/ExpertIdeas_2018_11.pdf

More of Yan Chen’s work: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3588132

Are you a teacher? Here are some student questions so you can easily incorporate this video into classroom discussions on the following topics:
Public goods: https://mru.io/0b3b8
Randomized trials: https://mru.io/a967a

Want to see more economists in the wild? Check out our playlist. https://mru.io/22dc8

Want to dive deeper? Wikipedia is what economists call a “public good”—learn more by watching this video: https://mru.io/public-6eb8d

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