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

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writing Wikipedia articles,

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but sometimes when it concerns 
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 references

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for the general public

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

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Everyone reads Wikipedia articles,
but sometimes you spot an error

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or you say, 
"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 
has been really surprising

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for economists because it relies 
purely on volunteer labor.

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The medical profession has found
that patients tend to bring printouts

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of Wikipedia articles 
to their doctor's office.

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Some of these articles 
are of low quality

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because they were not written by experts.

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

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to get experts to contribute 
to high quality content.

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

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to figure out what motivates people
to contribute to Wikipedia,

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whether it's social impact 
or private benefit

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or public acknowledgement,
or a combination of these factors.

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So in this study,
in this field experiment,

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we contacted about 4,000
academic economists.

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We have a generic message

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which says Wikipedia 
is a very valuable public good,

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

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Would you spend 
10 to 15 minutes commenting

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on these Wikipedia articles?

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Then we vary the paragraphs 
depending on whether

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they're in the treatment 
or the control group.

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

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might cite your research.

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And in the private benefit condition 
we say they might cite your research,

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

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acknowledge your contributions."

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Simply asking the expert,
"Would you contribute?"

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you get a pretty high response rate,

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

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When we sent out the links,
it turns out a third of the people

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actually contributed,
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 
really well-matched

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to their research expertise,

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they're much more likely 
to contribute,

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and they're contributing 
higher quality content.

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So good matching is really 
important for volunteering.

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We also try to figure out
are people more motivated

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by the private benefits,
what they get out

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of the contributions.

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So we do that by telling 
the treatment group

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that we'll send you articles
to comment on

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that might reference your research.

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So it turns out that knowing
that you might be cited

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increases the positive response rate
by about 13%.

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We also find 
that the public acknowledgement,

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saying that we will post 
your contributions

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and acknowledge 
your contributions publicly,

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people are more likely 
to provide high quality content.

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And public impact --
you know we vary the views

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of the Wikipedia articles
that we sent.

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We either say on average,
a Wikipedia will get 426 views.

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But we'll send articles which have 
at least 1,000 views to you.

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People are most motivated
when the private benefit

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is combined with the social impact.

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The social impact 
by itself actually doesn't

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quite have the same effect.

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I think if we replicate it 
in other fields

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we'll have more confidence
that private benefits,

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such as citation benefits,
would get people interested

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in contributing, 
and citation benefits

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in combination 
with social impact

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would have a larger effect.

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We need to push it 
to other fields as well

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to see if they're robust
across different communities.

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- [Narrator] Want to see more
economists in the wild?

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Check out our playlist.

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Are you a teacher?

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Here's some related material 
for your classroom.

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Want to dive deeper?

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Wikipedia is what economists 
call a "public good."

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Learn more by watching this video.

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♪ [music] ♪