University of Lapland Faculty of Education

Comparison essay Academic Writing Course

Tutor: Mike Hurd Students name: Raja Waheed Student number: 0354280

22.11.2013

In this essay, I am going to compare two articles based on the Wikipedia content contribution motivation. One of them is Online Motivational Factors: Incentives for Participation and Contribution in Wikipedia by Sheizaf Rafaeli and Yaron Ariel published in 2008, and the second article is Intrinsic Motivation of Open Content Contributors: the Case of Wikipedia by Xiaoquan Zhang and Feng Zhu published and re-edited in 2006. The advent of Internet technology, communication channels bandwidth, ease and speed of Web 2.0 has radically transformed the way people interact and share information on Internet. Now, people have more opportunities and resources to contribute their knowledge and information in the form of text, image and video to a much wider audience, and with much more feedback from peers and faraway people. This type of interaction and contribution is literally changing our attitude as active participant in online-society and contributors of knowledge rather than passive viewers of online information which is still considered as a growing problem for open content sharing sites. The motivation to contribute in online communities can be explained by diverse perspectives, as broadly examine by Rafaeli, S., & Ariel, Y. (2008), the psychological, the humanistic perspectives, social explanations such as group belongings and individual and interpersonal motives. After reading both articles and analyzing key motivation factors for content contribution in virtual informative community of Wikipedia, I come to conclusion that intrinsic motivation and interpersonal factors play an important role in Wikipedia content contribution as writers of both articles identify the non-profit nature of the Wikipedia for general contributors, thus emphasizing more on intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic rewards such as financial benefits, fame and career development. At the same time in both articles writers tried to explain the interconnection of intrinsic motivation with interpersonal factors as analyze by Zhang, X., & Zhu, F. (2006), Interpersonal factors give rise to the dynamics of intrinsic motivation. Interpersonal factors consist of perceived competence and a sense of relatedness with other community members,

interpersonal factors boost the motivation to participate and contribute. On the other hand, if a person believes that her contribution does not matter, performance motivation should decrease considerably even when this person values the meaningfulness of the task highly (Hertel et al. 2003). In my opinion article by Rafaeli, S., & Ariel, Y. (2008), is comprehensive and more detailed to explain the concept of online contribution, but at the same time it is more general in nature. According to Rafaeli, S., & Ariel, Y. (2008), This research has focused on Wikipedia (content quality and authority) and its technological structure and users (Wikipedians motivations, community aspects, and learning process). They try to explain the basic terms, meanings and technical information of the phenomena in detail. They analyze the broader dimension of Wikipedia contribution from their own and many other studies and from well documented theories of motivation, which already employed in various researches. On the other hand Zhang, X., & Zhu, F. (2006), examined Wikipedia as a case study of motivations for contributing open-source software. They suggest that open-source software developers might have an intrinsic motivation rooted in the fun of programming and learning. Based on textual analysis, their results indicate that the collaboration in the Wikipedia process enhances incentive to contribute. Zhang, X., & Zhu, F. (2006), explain the intrinsic motivation factors more clearly and accurately and according to the main theme of the article. Their research results are more authentic because of Zhang, X., & Zhu, F. (2006), supported their arguments by the acceptable quantity and quality of their research data In our analysis, we study the full text of all articles and their complete editing histories. These articles were posted and edited between January 16, 2001, and January 7, 2006. We have 1,778,594 titles in our data set. On the individual contributor level, research findings of both articles are nearly same for example, contributors' sense of meaningfulness, self-determination, and sense of relatedness to a community and a goal. From the perspective of an extrinsic reward and praise, Zhang, X., & Zhu, F.

(2006), only named extrinsic motivation but they never give any detail of it For Wikipedians, people who write and edit articles for Wikipedia, the incentive to freely contribute largely comes from intrinsic motivation. Using theories from extant social psychology and sociology literature, we show how Wikipedia effectively enhances contributors' intrinsic motivation. While Rafaeli, S., & Ariel, Y. (2008) examine and quote the various previous studies about external rewards for contribution, among them is Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2008), study, in which they explain, contributing to Wikipedia is not rewarded by immediate economic benefits but Peer production is the key element of such economic environment, they named it Wikinomics which can be beneficial for contributor reputation building. The Wikimedia contributor can earn future trust without any extra cost as producing and replicating information in online environment is almost costless, contrary to other goods or services. Low cost for contribution, no special software and hardware device is needed to edit Wikimedia page contents. For Wikipedia participants online behavior Zhang, X., & Zhu, F. (2006), never categorized any of the contributors but Rafaeli, S., & Ariel, Y. (2008) propose that Wikipedians participation and contribution can be categorize from professional versus nonprofessional participation, constructive, confrontational, and vandalistic participation, anonymous versus identiable participation. The one common factor discussed among current articles and several other studies on Wiki-culture found a small percentage of users typically provide the majority of the content. The motivations of contributors are therefore have great value for future researchers to study. Wikiculture needs thorough investigation of the structure and beliefs that serve as motivation for users to generate user-generated content. As indicated at the second paragraph of this essay about lack of active participation and contribution in open content sharing sites like Wikipedia, but I am totally convinced from the study of Budhathoki, N. R., & Nedovic-Budic, Z. (2008) about reconceptualization of the role of the internet user as producer of the content. I have strong belief

that boundary between active contributors and passive users of the Internet have been blurring and disappearing since the start of the social communication sites. The current passive users of the internet will be the active contributors of the Internet in future.

Bibliography
1. Budhathoki, N. R., & Nedovic-Budic, Z. (2008). Reconceptualizing the role of the user of spatial data infrastructure. GeoJournal, 72(3-4), 149-160. 2. Hertel, G., Niedner, S., & Herrmann, S. (2003). Motivation of software developers in Open Source projects: an Internet-based survey of contributors to the Linux kernel. Research policy, 32(7), 1159-1177. 3. Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2008). Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. Penguin. com. 4. Rafaeli, S., & Ariel, Y. (2008). 11 Online Motivational Factors: Incentives for Participation and Contribution in Wikipedia. 5. Zhang, X., & Zhu, F. (2006). Intrinsic motivation of open content contributors: The case of Wikipedia. In Workshop on Information Systems and Economics.