Hi everyone,
Can expressions of gratitude make online communities stronger and more inclusive? Or does thanking others for their voluntary efforts have little effect?
CAT Lab https://citizensandtech.org/ has partnered with Arabic, German, Persian and Polish language Wikipedias to answer those questions - and more - in two new studies.
In a field experiment that organized experienced Wikipedians to thank thousands of editors https://citizensandtech.org/2020/06/effects-of-saying-thanks-on-wikipedia/, we found that *receiving a Thanks increased two week retention by 2 percentage points* on average. Receiving thanks also causes recipients to send 43% more thanks on average (preprint https://osf.io/dmwef/).
A partner study looked at the effects on senders of giving Thanks https://citizensandtech.org/2020/06/mentoring-thanking-and-burnout-wikipedia/. While we did not find an effect, this could be because *many** volunteers already felt emotionally drained from their efforts on Wikipedia and weren't able to complete the study*. Because of this, we made valuable discoveries about who spends time supporting others, how they think about the intentions of newcomers, and how they feel about their work. We also gained insights into Wikipedians who consider themselves "mentors" and "monitors" (preprint https://osf.io/m9cy6/).
We value feedback and discussion as we move our pre-prints toward submission for publication.
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Our team of Julia Kamin, Max Klein, Eric Pennington, and I are tremendously grateful to the many Wikipedians who partnered with us in this work, in particular our eight liaisons who worked closely with us in the design of the studies, including Reem Al-Kashif, Christine Domgörgen, Mohamed ElGohary, Maria Heuschkel, Amir Ladsgroup, Wojciech Pędzich, Mohsen Salek, and Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska.
Conducting Collaborative Field Experiments with Wikipedia Communities
This research was done in collaboration with language Wikipedias and reviewed by two university ethics boards. We hope that this research inspires more participatory research that is co-created by Wikipedia communities.
In the next year, we are working to open our process & software to a wider range of communities and researchers. Toward that end, CAT Lab is currently developing ideas and fundraising for our next round of collaborations, building on our workshops and community research summit https://citizensandtech.org/2019/11/research-summit-with-wikimedians/ in Stockholm last year. If you have ideas, please reach out!