Wikipedia: How to Motivate Expert Contributions? (Yan Chen, University of Michigan)

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

writing Wikipedia articles,

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

I really want the experts' input.

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Wikipedia is one of the most
important references

for the general public

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

Everyone reads Wikipedia articles,
but sometime you spot an error

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

But you move on

and say, "Someone else might fix it."

That's called the "free rider problem."

The success of Wikipedia
has been really surprising

for economists because it relies
purely on volunteer labor.

The medical profession has found
that patients tend to bring printouts

of Wikipedia articles
to their doctor's office.

Some of these articles
are of low quality

because they were not written by experts.

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

to get experts to contribute
to high quality content.

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

to figure out what motivates people
to contribute to Wikipedia,

whether it's social impact
or private benefit

or public acknowledgement
or a combination of these factors.

So in this study,
in this field experiment,

we contacted about 4,000
academic economists.

We have a generic message

that says Wikipedia
is a very valuable public good,

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

Would you spend
10 to 15 minutes commenting

on these Wikipedia articles?

Then we vary the paragraphs
depending on whether

they're in the treatment
or the control group.

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

might cite your research.

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

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

acknowledge your contributions."

Simply asking the expert,
"Would you contribute?"

you get a pretty high response rate,

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

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

actually contributed,
and we look at what are the features

that predict contributions.

It turns out that if the article is
really well-matched

to their research expertise,

they're much more likely
to contribute,

and they're contributing
higher quality content.

So good matching is really
important for volunteering.

We also try to figure out
are people more motivated

by the private benefits,
what they get out

of the contributions.

So we do that by telling
the treatment group

that we'll send you articles
to comment on

that might reference your research.

So it turns out that knowing
that you might be cited

increases the positive response rate
by about 13%.

We also find
that the public acknowledgement,

saying that we will post
your contributions

and acknowledge
your contributions publicly,

people are more likely
to provide high quality content.

And public impact --
you know we vary the views

of the Wikipedia articles
that we sent.

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

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

People are most motivated
when the private benefit

is combined with the social impact.

The social impact
by itself actually doesn't

quite have the same effect.

I think if we replicate it
in other fields,

we'll have more confidence
that private benefits,

such as citation benefits
would get people interested

in contributing
and citation benefits

in combination
with social impact

would have a larger effect.

We need to push it
to other fields as well

to see if they're robust
across different communities.

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

Check out our playlist.

Are you a teacher?

Here's some related material
for your classroom.

Want to dive deeper?

Wikipedia is what economists
call a "public good."

Learn more by watching this video.

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