[WikiEN-l] Punished by Rewards?

[William Pietri]

Right now I'm reading through (and loving) Alfie Kohn's "Punished by 
Rewards". [1] I'm wondering if this had any influence on Wikipedia's 
early days, as our culture seems to fit well with his views.


Kohn's basic thesis is that a lot of common reward mechanisms have 
perverse effects. In this he includes incentive pay, symbolic awards 
like gold stars, and even many kinds of praise. He believes that 
although those systems can work in the short term for mechanical tasks, 
they harm intrinsic motivation over the long term, corroding 
relationships and reducing creativity. He also suggests that reward and 
punishment are two sides of the same coin, and have a lot of parallel 
negative effects. And he cites a raft of research (none of which I've 
looked at).

The relationship I see with Wikipedia is our near complete lack of a 
reward or approval system. There's no official merit ladder, no 
point-scoring system, no way to trade your edit count in for valuable 
prizes, no special goodies for the editor of the month. We do have 
barnstars, but those don't imply a power relationship between giver and 
receiver, and they're never dangled as bait.

Just as interesting is the strong streak in our culture against 
incentive plans and formal scoring systems. People continually rail 
against editcountitis. We try hard to make sure people understand that 
adminship is no big deal. We even do a good job at making sure admins 
live that.

The naive behaviorist view, which Kohn sees as pervasive in our society, 
is that people would never do a bunch of creative work for nothing; 
you'd have to reward them somehow. In my eyes, Wikipedia is a fantastic 
counter-example to that notion.


I didn't really start paying close attention to Wikipedia's culture 
until 2004, at which point I think a lot of these norms were well 
established. Does anybody know the history, and whether there were 
external sources or inspirations for the things I mention? Was there an 
explicit decision to avoid reward systems? Or did it just happen?


Thanks,

William


[1] http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm


-- 
William Pietri <william at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri