The effect of social capital and individual motivation in voluntary participation of chinese wikipedians

Abstract

Wikipedia is an online collaborative encyclopedia project, which is composed all by voluntary contributors. As the most popular reference website, its traffic is ranked among top 10 by Alexa.com in the past six months. What makes Wikipedia so prevalent all over the world? What mechanisms does it use to encourage the knowledge sharing activities through internet? And how does it coordinate the huge online collaboration of Wikipedians who are geographically distributed? The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the psychological and behavioral patterns of Chinese Wikipedians, and validate the influence and effect of social capital and individual motivation in online voluntary collaborations. In order to answer the above questions and fulfill the purpose of this research, a case study of Chinese Wikipedia based on the theories of social capital and individual motivation is conducted. The structural dimension, relational dimension and cognitive dimension of social capital are adopted together with the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to construct the theoretical framework. The study is consisted of two parts: the first part is a descriptive analysis of the massive voluntary collaboration model of Wikipedia and some typical instances of Chinese Wikipedia community corresponding to the factors of social capital and individual motivation; the second part is a small scale online survey about the contribution levels and psychological status of Chinese Wikipedians, which is used to complement the descriptive data and support the integrated theoretical framework. The result of the case study partially proved the proposals about the effects of social capital and individual motivation in Wikipedia community. This online survey measures the contribution level, social capital and individual motivation of each individual respondent. Based on the contribution level, Wikipedia users are divided into two groups. “Wikimania” is used to represent the high involved users, w...