Wikipedia: Wie und unter welchen Annahmen funktioniert Wikipedia. Motivation, ökonomisches Model - Wikipedia: What assumptions is Wikipedia based ...
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Wikipedia: Wie und unter welchen Annahmen funktioniert Wikipedia.
Motivation, ökonomisches Model
Wikipedia: What assumptions is Wikipedia based on. Motivation, economic model
by Jevgenija Kezika (0250383)Abstract In the recent years virtual communities have gain in popularity. These communities cover numerous topics, starting from exchange of experience and reaching to the exchange of information, digital goods, etc. One example of such a community is Wikipedia, a project initiated by Larry Sanger in 2001, is an open content online encyclopedia project hosted by Bomis, a WebPortal company. This free of charge encyclopedia is created by its users, with everyone being able to contribute new, to add or to change information contained in it. Moreover, Wikipedia has been growing and developing rapidly with the quality of the content being constantly improved. While many expected such project to fail due to a low number of users and acts of vandalism, the opposite happened. The contributors to Wikipedia are numerous, leading to researchers trying to explain their incentives. These explanations range from pure altruism to a rational utility maximizing behavior. Such functions as “change history” function and alerting people whenever a specific page has been change reduce the vandalism to a minimum. Nevertheless, some authors point out the challenges of such a community, e.g. the issue of trust, division of authority, growth of complexity in the course of the community’s development, etc.
Jevgenija Kezika Assumptions of Wikipedia
1. Introduction
There has been a lot of attention to open source movement from the scientific as well as
business communities lately. The first applications of this approach can be found in software
development. Further development of this movement led to the extension of its application on
other areas such as collection and analysis of information. This new concept can be referred to
as Open Source Intelligence with most important principles being “peer review, reputation
rather than sanctions-based authority, the free sharing of products, and flexible levels of
involvement and responsibility” [StHi02]. One of the very famous examples for the Open
Source Intelligence is Wikipedia, online collaboratively developed encyclopaedia.
First of all, it is useful to define the term “information” and distinguish it from the term
“knowledge”. David and Foray define knowledge as a cognitive capacity giving their holders
ability to act intellectually or physically [DaFo03]. Information, on the other hand, is
structured and formatted data that remains passive until used by those with knowledge
[DaFo03]. One can think of Wikipedia as a combination of the two terms defined above. In
the rest of the paper, the product of Wikipedia community will be referred as information
good. From the economic point of view one can distinguish between private and public
information goods. The main distinction of these two is that the owners of the private
information goods can legally enforce their rights on these commodities and, for instance,
limit the access to them. On the other hand, public information goods are not limited in their
distribution and reproduction. Nevertheless, combinations of these two goods are possible
[GaSt03]. Wikipedia is considered to be public information good and theoretical background
of this work will be based on this notion.
The work is divided into five sections. In section 2 Wikipedia project will be introduced
giving short insights on its origins, funding and members. Section 3 analyses Wikipedia from
the theoretical point of view, a value chain model is constructed and several motivation and
group theories are presented. Section 4 takes a critical point of view on Wikipedia and
discusses main challenges and risks for such projects as Wikipedia. Finally, the work is
summarised in chapter 5.
2. Introducing Wikipedia
2.1. Brief history of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a project of Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded by Jimmy
Wales on June 20, 2003. The foundation aims at developing and maintaining free-content
projects based on wiki technology and providing these contents to the general public free of
charge. Numerous projects have been already developed by the foundation such as Wikipedia,
a multi-lingual encyclopaedia, Wiktionary, a multi-language dictionary and thesaurus,
Wikiquote, an encyclopaedia of quotations, and many others. Wikimedia uses GNU Free
Documentation Licence (GNU FDL) for all its projects, giving the readers a right “to copy,
redistribute and modify a work and requiring all copies and derivatives to be available under
the same license” [Wikime]. Wiki technology (named after “wiki wiki” or “quick” in
Hawaiian language) is a kind of website very good suitable for collaborative writing. It allows
its users a very quick and easy creation, editing and correction of content, sometimes even
without registration [Wikime].
1Jevgenija Kezika Assumptions of Wikipedia
The free encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, a fusion of terms wiki and encyclopaedia, came into life
on January 15, 2001 and has developed on a very rapid basis. The number of articles has
increased rapidly to more than 4,300,000 in more than 200 languages, with English and
German editions containing the biggest amount of articles. The everyday traffic is handled
with the help of more than 100 servers in four locations all over the world. One of the core
policies of Wikipedia, a “neutral point of view”, tells that the articles should depict all
important perspectives without trying to outweigh one or several of these perspectives. The
articles can be added or edited by every visitor, though depending on the intention a
registration might be required. There have been some attempts to vandalise Wikipedia,
however, an ability to ban a user misusing the encyclopaedia, as well as protection of articles
for a short time help to reduce these attempts to a minimum. There is no editorial group
controlling the articles, all decisions on content and editorial policies are done through the
consensus or by vote, with Jimmy Wales having the final decisive power on policies and user
guidelines. Several other projects have forked from Wikipedia due to its refusal to display
commercial advertising and willingness to keep the “neutral point of view”, e.g. Wikinfo and
Enciclopedia Libre [Wikipe].
2.2. Funding
The funding of Wikipedia is provided by its parent organisation Wikimedia Foundation. The
main costs are incurred by hardware, e.g. for the fourth quarter of 2005 the total costs
amounted to US$ 321,000 with 60% of this amount being spent on hardware. As already
mentioned above the facilitation of everyday traffic requires more than 100 servers. Money is
raised by donations with several companies such as Yahoo and Bomis helping out with
equipment and services. The foundation is trying to keep their costs transparent by publishing
the budget and expenditures regularly. While the most of the work is performed by the
volunteers, Wikimedia employs several people on a permanent basis. The organisers of
Wikimedia are constantly looking for other funding opportunities, some of the ideas are to sell
the print version of Wikipedia or introducing a membership system [Wikime].
2.3. Contributors
Though Wikipedia has a lot of users, the number of authors is rather low. For example, during
December 2005, Wikipedia had around 27,000 users making at least five edits that month,
while, there are only about 4,000 users editing the encyclopaedia more than 100 times per
month. Maintenance is performed usually voluntarily, with some of the users being awarded a
status of the administrator, what allows them to temporarily or permanently block some users
from editing Wikipedia [Wikipe].
3. Theoretical Background
3.1. Value Chain of the Open Content
Gordijn [Gord02] offers an e3-value methodology for the evaluation of business ideas of
electronic services. This approach combines the analysis of economic value creation,
distribution and consumption in a multi-user network with requirements engineering. Though,
2Jevgenija Kezika Assumptions of Wikipedia
it manly aimed at commercial content it is interesting to explore the application of this model
on the open content [Cede03]. The basic difference concerning value chains of a business and
open content is the driving force of such a chain. In a business model the driving force is
usually a customer, who is demanding a specific type of content for which he is eager to pay.
In an open content project, where information or other type of content is distributed free of
charge, the driving force is actually a content producer, who decides what information or what
good to provide to the users. Figure 1 offers an example of such an e3-value model for a value
chain of the online newspaper Amsterdam Times. This model consists of actors such as users,
content providers, local operator and telecommunication consortium. The value exchange
occurs through obtaining content and offering something back, in this case the readers can
read articles online paying in exchange a certain fee. Furthermore, there is a value interface
grouping the value exchanges for a certain actor. It is also important to note that this value
chain is triggered by a readers need, a start stimulus, while the end stimulus can be described
by the activities of the last actor of the value chain, in this case the local operator [Cede03].
Figure 1: An example of e3-value model
The value chain of an open content project such as Wikipedia will look somewhat different.
Cedergren suggests his interpretation of an open content value chain, however, arguing that
start and stop stimuli, as it is the case in a business model, are very difficult to identify in this
case. A generalised model suggested by him is depicted in figure 2 [Cede03].
3Jevgenija Kezika Assumptions of Wikipedia
Figure 2: An example of the open content value model
The main actors in this model are producer and user, gaining the most of benefits. The author
also includes society as an indirect participant in this model. Furthermore, some driving forces
for participation in such a project are described [Cede03]. Since these driving forces are one
of the main parts of this work, this issue will be treated in the next section. In this chapter an
attempt will be made to create a specific value model for Wikipedia. First of all, it is
important to determine the main actors of the model. As for Wikipedia, the main users are
readers, who are not contributors, small scale editors, who are users at the same time,
administrators, Wikimedia Foundation and companies or people contributing equipment,
services or just financial aid. In figure 3 a value model of Wikipedia suggested by Cedergren
has been slightly adjusted to include all the above mentioned actors. Moreover, an attempt has
been made to show the approximate value flows between the actors.
equipment/
articles services
User/Editor Wikimedia Sponsors
articles, feedback Foundation PR
reputation? quality quality
reputation
Administrators
Figure 3: An approximate Wikipedia value model
Nevertheless, this model cannot be taken as granted, the motivation of the participants, the
driving forces influencing such project as Wikipedia have to be analysed in detail. The
complexity of the value chains between the actors is much higher than that assumed in figure
3. The next chapters will try to give insights into these issues.
3.2. Bases of Motivation to Contribute to the Open Content
Several theories exist attempting to analyse and understand the motivation behind
participation in such open source projects. These theories will be discussed in this chapter in
the connection with Wikipedia.
4Jevgenija Kezika Assumptions of Wikipedia
Several authors describe an open source community as an epistemic community defined as a
“group of practitioners that adopts a role as provider of information for decision-making in a
context of uncertainty” [GaSt03]. All members of the community share a set of beliefs,
methodologies, objectives and values. The membership in such a community is generally
open to all. New users learn and adopt these values slowly, first by being the “outsiders” and
then becoming the “insiders” [GaSt03]. Also Wikipedia is based on a set of beliefs that are
followed by all participants. “Neutral point of view” is one of the obvious examples of such a
value. These values can be acquired partially by reading the mission statement of Wikipedia,
partially through the experience gained while contributing to the encyclopaedia or just reading
the articles. Interestingly, these values are “lived”, i.e. are actively supported by the
participants such as editors or administrators. New users, who start to be involved with the
project, can experience their articles being changed or in extreme cases their accounts being
blocked when not supporting the community beliefs [Wikipe]. Finally, this theory suggests a
set of drivers to involve in such a community:
- Demonstration of technical competency in a community of same minded people
- An ability to influence or control the process of creation
- To produce something useful for oneself
- To gain specific knowledge
- To engage in a community with goals corresponding or similar with individual ones.
It has to be noted that since such communities are mostly heterogeneous, the driving forces
might vary from individual to individual [GaSt03].
Another block of theory related with the topic of this work is club theory, which concerns the
formation of groups. This theory assumes that the groups are built in order to confer the
externalities. The reason for doing this is sharing of costs of using this service. The size of
group is, however, limited due to a crowding effect. Club models are analysed on the basis of
different equilibrium concepts, which will not be described here due to a rather limited scope
of this work. Nevertheless, one conclusion is worth mentioning. The participants act
cooperatively with the purpose of maximising their utility. If no group member can be better
off by using solely their own endowments, e.g. knowledge, there is a strong motivation to
increase own utility by collaborating with others [Scot02]. Generally, this theory concerns
local clubs, i.e. geographically closely located groups. In case of Wikipedia one can talk about
a global club, possible due to Internet. Nevertheless, also here a crowding effect is possible.
The number of users cannot grow to infinity due to a certain hardware problem at some point
of time. As the number of users and, hence, traffic increases, the number of servers should
increase too. This leads to a problem of increased costs, which might make Wikipedia
unattractive, due to server overload and slow access. Nevertheless, there are also some
differences between the assumptions of the club theory and Wikipedia as such. The theory
assumes that low membership costs of a club will reduce the quality of service, reducing in
turn the attractiveness of the club [Scot02]. Wikipedia is not based on membership fees; the
quality is, however, considered to be comparable with other encyclopaedias such as
Encyclopaedia Britannica [Gile06].
Lerner and Tirole [LeTi02] suggest that a person is willing to participate in a project only
when receiving a net benefit, which can be divided into immediate payoff and delayed payoff.
A very important cost item for an open content participant is the opportunity costs. Instead of
contributing to the open content a person could be monetary remunerated for some other
work. Moreover, the person is not concentrating on his/her primary tasks such as job or study
leading to some delayed costs. Among the immediate benefits one can name a learning effect
and a fun factor a participant is experiencing while taking part in an interesting project.
5Jevgenija Kezika Assumptions of Wikipedia
Possible career opportunity and peer recognition can be considered as delayed incentives. The
economic theory suggests that the delayed incentives can become stronger due to several
factors:
- The more visible the performance to the relevant audience
- The higher the impact of efforts on the performance, and
- The more informative the performance about the talent [LeTi02].
Furthermore, the authors compare open content project and a business project (though the
authors concentrate on the software development some conclusions are also applicable to
Wikipedia). The main benefits in comparison with similar business products are lower costs
of information, full involvement in the project and wider range of knowledge acquired
[LeTi02]. Though, not all of these factors might be applicable to the case of Wikipedia, some
are still worth of considering. Since the amount of articles contained in Wikipedia is growing
rapidly, also the audience is increasing. The articles are anonymous without a name of the
author at the end of the article. Nevertheless, it is possible to track all changes and recognise
the participant by his username. The prominent contributors can acquire a special status with
additional rights not available to others [Wikipe]. Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that
calculating net payoff is rather difficult if not impossible since not only financial gains or
costs are involved.
Curien et al [CFLM05] have chosen different approach for analysing online communities. The
question they try to answer concerns to a greater extent the reasons or the extent of
underparticipation since private interests of the users might lead to a behaviour harmful to
general interest. Standard literature on public goods argues that private interests lead to free-
riding and uncoordinated management of shared resources. At the same time some online
communities, e.g. Wikipedia, show an opposite evidence of some private incentives to
contribute. It seems that contribution brings much more benefits than non-contribution.
Though, the authors analyse “experience-sharing” communities and user communities, where
the focus is on sharing information or experience in regard to some product, several insights
concerning the users/editors of Wikipedia can still be acquired. The paper offers an attempt to
categorise the individuals who are likely to participate in an online community. Four types of
participants can be distinguished:
- Pure contributors are those, who do not require reciprocity from their contribution, e.g. by
being interested purely in reputation.
- Reciprocal contributors do expect reciprocity from other participants, being interested on
the quality or amount of the public good.
- Pure askers do not contribute can, however, raise interesting issues or participate in the
discussions, while
- Lurkers just obtain information and do not contribute at all [CFLM05].
These shortly mentioned motivational factors might help to sustain the community or, on the
contrary, might lead to its destruction. Reciprocation or private, e.g. reputation, incentives are
likely to help the community to grow and improve. However, since public goods are mostly
not exclusive, there is also a great incentive to free riding. The authors argue that in such
communities free riding is less beneficial than contribution since the information is not
tailored to the needs of the free rider [CFLM05]. In case of Wikipedia it might result in some
specific topics being left uncovered or insufficiently covered.
To conclude and summarise this section the concept of gift economy can be shortly presented.
This concept has been introduced by the field of anthropology and has a long history. It
describes gifts as a form of economy or its alternative, being used by the “primitive” societies
6Jevgenija Kezika Assumptions of Wikipedia
and paradoxically evolving now. Virtual communities can be best understood as gift
economy, the most evident example being pirate software or other digital goods [Rehn04].
Wikipedia can also be seen as an example of a gift economy, where the offered gift is
information. This might help to explain why most of economic models are not fully applicable
to this type of communities.
4. Challenges of an Open Content Project
Of course there has been a lot of criticism concerning Wikipedia, some of which also
deserved due to several accidents of posting false, biased or misleading information on some
topics. This section will treat challenges, risks and possible future developments of
Wikipedia.
One of the main issues thoroughly discussed in media or on the Internet is the issue of trust.
This is true due to the anonymity of actors in a virtual community. As already mentioned
above, most of Wikipedia users are either identified via nicknames or are fully anonymous.
Many authors describe trust as one of the main factors influencing the level of participation in
a virtual community. Lack of trust might lead to contributors of relevant and unbiased
information being discouraged to contribute due to disappointment of their information being
invisible or fear of not receiving anything back due to a big amount of wrong information.
The element of reputation as well as the ability to trace past information lower this probability
of good contributors retaining from the community [CFLM05].
The issue of trust is closely related to the problem of free riding in virtual communities.
Curien et al [CFLM05] consider that the relation between individual efforts and the collective
outcomes influences the amount of free riders in the community. The size of the effort
depends on the individual’s expectations on the behaviour of other participants in relation to
his participation. “Bandwagon” expectations result in individual believing that others will do
the same, i.e. either contribute or free ride. Individuals having “opportunistic” expectations
assume that the others will do the opposite. It is difficult to analyse what kind of expectations
are prevalent in Wikipedia community, the “bandwagon” expectations resulting in two
extremes, mutual free riding or mutual cooperation, and the “opportunistic” expectations
resulting for example in a dominant contributing group with a minority of free riders
[CFLM05]. The truth lies most probably in the middle with the extreme of contributors
becoming free riders being a possible development and posing, thus, a threat on the further
development of the project.
Garcia and Steinmueller [GaSt03] discuss several models of information goods production
and have identified several actors involved in this process the most important being producer
or author and editor. Already in a simple model with only two actors involved, the publishing
process is complicated by the problems of authority and conflict. Both actors have to agree on
who has more competence concerning the content and who decides when the work is ready
for publishing. When considering the case of collaborative information goods production, the
complexity and space for a conflict grows even more. Each of the parties might decide to
publish the information without obtaining the agreement of the other leaving the reader in
uncertainty, which of the information goods are authentic and which are not. In case of
encyclopaedia, its vertical structure, where more specific information is based on general
information, can lead to further problems, e.g. when mistakes on the general levels of
information might result in uselessness of the upper more specific levels of information. One
possible solution is to introduce a system integrator responsible for preserving the integrity of
the whole system [GaSt03]. In Wikipedia community such system integrators are the
7Jevgenija Kezika Assumptions of Wikipedia
administrators, people with high reputation and long history of contribution. Nevertheless,
this does not assure that the possible conflicts will never occur. Lack of agreement between
the administrators might result in the additional problems, especially when the number of
such administrators is high. This issue is closely connected with the growth of complexity
with the project maturity. As the encyclopaedia grows, there is a growing probability of losing
an overview over the project and, hence, threatening its existence.
Other more specific risks of Wikipedia include:
- Accuracy: there is no warranty that the information is correct
- Uncertain expertise: the contributors are mostly anonymous and their expertise is
unknown
- Volatility: future contributors might negate the information already provided leaving the
user in uncertainty which contribution to cite or use.
- Coverage: there is no concrete plan on what to contribute and in what amount, hence,
some topics might be excluded
- Sources: even if the “independent point of view” is of great value to Wikipedia, some
sources might not be independent [DHPW05].
To sum up, one can say that there are plenty of risks and challenges facing Wikipedia now
and in the future. Nevertheless, the project has successfully developed during the last 5 years
despite numerous sceptic views. In order to overcome the above mentioned threats, it is
important to take them seriously and to undertake preventive actions.
5. Conclusion
This work tried to analyse an open content project Wikipedia, an online collaborative
encyclopaedia, from the point of value chains involved, driving forces influencing the
members of the community and threats and challenges facing the project now and in the
nearest future. It is difficult to apply economic models to such a project, since many factors
involved are not taken into account. When trying to design a value chain model, one
recognises that the start stimuli are not that obvious as it is in case of a business model, where
the consumer needs can be easily recognised as a starting stimulus. In case of Wikipedia,
these are the authors themselves, who decide on what should be published and what should
not be taken into account. Moreover, there is no financial value exchanged between the actors,
making the conclusions somewhat ambiguous. Several motivational theories have been
introduced in order to analyse the motivation behind the decision to get involved into such an
open content project. It seems that Wikipedia is to some extent an epistemic community with
certain beliefs and values. Also different driving forces have been recognised, e.g. reputation,
knowledge acquisition, future career possibilities, fun, etc. Some authors even try to classify
the members of such communities in order to overcome the problem of heterogeneity of their
members. Finally, though Wikipedia has shown a great amount of growth in its first years,
there are still some threats that could slow down or even stop this growth. Among the most
important threats are lack of trust, free riding, high complexity, lack of competence and other.
To conclude, it can be said that Wikipedia is a rather new phenomenon with yet a very
uncertain future. In order to facilitate development of other similar communities, valid models
have to be developed. This issue can become a central point for further research.
8Jevgenija Kezika Assumptions of Wikipedia
Reference List
[Cede03] Cedergren, Magnus: Open Content and Value Creation. In: First Monday 8 (2003)
8.
[CFLM05] Curien, Nicolas; Fauchart, Emmanuelle; Laffond, Gilbert; Moreau, Francois:
Online Consumer Communities: Escaping the Tragedy of the Digital Commons. In:
Brousseau, E. (ed.): Internet and Digital Economics. Principles, Methods and Applications.
Cambridge University Press 2005.
[Gile06] Giles, Jim: Internet Encyclopaedias go Head to Head.
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html, 2006-03-28, retrieved on 2006-
06-01
[DaFo03] David, Paul A.; Foray, Dominique: Economic Fundamentals of the Knowledge
Society. In: Policy Futures in Education 1 (2003) 1.
[DHPW05] Denning, Peter; Horning, Jim; Parnas, David; Weinstein, Lauren: Wikipedia
Risks. In: Communication of the ACM 48 (2005) 12.
[GaSt03] Garcia, Juan M.; Steinmueller,: Applying the Open Source Development Model to
Knowledge Work. In: SPRU Electronic Working Paper Series (2003). Paper No. 94.
[Gord02] Gordijn, J.: Value based requirements engineering: Exploring innovative e-
commerce ideas. Dissertation at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gordijn/thesis.htm, retrieved on 2006-03-25.
[LeTi02] Lerner, Josh; Tirole, Jean: The Simple Economics of Open Source. In: Journal of
Industrial Economics 52 (2002), p. 197-234.
[Rehn04] Rehn, Alf: The Politics of Contraband. The Honor Economies of the Warez Scene.
In: Journal of Socio-Economics 33 (2004), p. 359-374.
[Scot02] Scotchmer, Suzanne: Local Public Goods and Clubs. In: Auerbach, A.J., Feldstein,
M. (ed.): Handbook of Public Economics 4 (2002).
[StHi02] Stalder, Felix; Hirsh, Jesse: Open Source Intelligence. In: First Monday 7 (2002) 6.
[Wikime] WIKIMEDIA Foundation: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/About_Wikimedia,
retrieved on 2006-06-01
[Wikipe] Wikipedia: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia, retrieved on 2006-06-01
9You can also read
