Hello, everyone,

The next Research Showcase, “Group Membership and Contributions to Public Information Goods: The Case of WikiProject” and “Thanks for Stopping By: A Study of ‘Thanks’ Usage on Wikimedia,” will be live-streamed next Wednesday, April 17, 2019, at 11:30 AM PDT/19:30 UTC.

YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmb5LoJzOoE

As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You can also watch our past research showcases here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase

This month's presentations:

 

Group Membership and Contributions to Public Information Goods: The Case of WikiProject

By Ark Fangzhou Zhang

Abstract:

We investigate the effects of group identity on contribution behavior on the English Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia that gives free access to the public. Using an instrumental variable approach that exploits the variations in one’s exposure to WikiProject, we find that joining a WikiProject has a significant impact on one’s level of contribution, with an average increase of 79 revisions or 8,672 character per month. To uncover the potential mechanism underlying the treatment effect, we use the size of home page for WikiProject as a proxy for the number of recommendations from a project. The results show that the users who join a WikiProject with more recommendations significantly increase their contribution to articles under the joined project, but not to articles under other projects.

 

Thanks for Stopping By: A Study of ‘Thanks’ Usage on Wikimedia

By Swati Goel

Abstract:

The Thanks feature on Wikipedia, also known as "Thanks," is a tool with which editors can quickly and easily send one other positive feedback. The aim of this project is to better understand this feature: its scope, the characteristics of a typical "Thanks" interaction, and the effects of receiving a thank on individual editors. We study the motivational impacts of "Thanks" because maintaining editor engagement is a central problem for crowdsourced repositories of knowledge such as Wikimedia. Our main findings are that most editors have not been exposed to the Thanks feature (meaning they have never given nor received a thank), thanks are typically sent upwards (from less experienced to more experienced editors), and receiving a thank is correlated with having high levels of editor engagement. Though the prevalence of "Thanks" usage varies by editor experience, the impact of receiving a thank seems mostly consistent for all users. We empirically demonstrate that receiving a thank has a strong positive effect on short-term editor activity across the board and provide preliminary evidence that thanks could compound to have long-term effects as well.

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Janna Layton (she, her)

Administrative Assistant - Audiences & Technology 

Wikimedia Foundation 

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