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- [Yan] It's good that we have[br]an army of enthusiasts

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writing Wikipedia articles,

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but sometimes when it concerns [br]a disease that I might have,

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I really want the experts' input.

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♪ [music] ♪

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Wikipedia is one of the most important[br]references for the general public.

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It's actually one of the most top five[br]most visited websites in the world.

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Everyone reads Wikipedia articles,[br]but sometime you spot an error

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or you say, [br]"Well, this is not really correct."

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But you move on

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and say, "Someone else might fix it."

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That's called the "free rider problem."

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The success of Wikipedia [br]has been really surprising

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for economists because it relies [br]purely on volunteer labor.

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The medical profession has found[br]that patients tend to bring printouts

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of Wikipedia articles [br]to their doctor's office.

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Some of these articles are low quality

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because they were not written by experts.

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We're trying to figure out [br]what are the some of the motivators

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to get experts to contribute [br]to high quality content.

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So we decided to do a field experiment[br]to tease out the causalities,

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to figure out what motivates people[br]to contribute to Wikipedia,

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whether it's social impact [br]or private benefit

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or public acknowledgement[br]or a combination of these factors.

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So in this study,[br]in this field experiment,

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we contacted about 4,000[br]academic economists.

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We have a generic message

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that says Wikipedia [br]is a very valuable public good,

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and yet lots of the articles [br]are inaccurate or not up to date.

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Would you spend [br]10 to 15 minutes commenting

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on these Wikipedia articles?

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Then we vary the paragraphs [br]depending on whether

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they're in the treatment [br]or control group.

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In the control group, [br]we don't mention that the articles

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might cite your research.

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And in the private benefit [br]we say they might cite your research,

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and we have another condition[br]which says, "We will publicly

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acknowledge your contributions."

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Simply asking the expert,[br]"Would you contribute?"

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you get pretty high response rate,

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which is about 45% of the people[br]say, "Yes, I'm willing."

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When we send out the links,[br]it turns out a third of the people

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actually contributed,[br]and we look at what are the features

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that predict contributions,

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it turns out that if the article is [br]really