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Motivations of Wikipedia content contributors

Computers in Human BehaviorPublished 6 May 2010
Heng‐Li Yang, Cheng-Yu Lai
Citations267
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score2.92
SNIP3.35

TL;DR

Analysis of the effects of both conventional and self concept-based motivation on individual willingness to share knowledge in Wikipedia showed that internal self-concept motivation is the key motivation for knowledge sharing on Wikipedia.

Abstract

Rapidly developing web technologies have increased the prevalence of user-generated Internet content. Of the many websites with user-generated content on the Internet, one of the most renowned is Wikipedia, which is the largest multilingual free-content encyclopedia written by users collaboratively. Nevertheless, although contributing to Wikipedia takes time and knowledge, contributors are rarely compensated. As a result, there is a need to understand why individuals share their knowledge in Wikipedia. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of both conventional and self concept-based motivation on individual willingness to share knowledge in Wikipedia. After performing an online questionnaire survey, SEM was applied to assess the proposed model and hypotheses. The analytical results showed that internal self-concept motivation is the key motivation for knowledge sharing on Wikipedia.

Keywords

Social SciencesComputer Science