Why be a Wikipedian

Wikipedia is a user-edited encyclopedia. Unpaid users contribute articles, edit them, and have heated debates about what information should be included or excluded. This study is designed to learn more about why people are willing to do this work without any fiscal compensation. Wikipedia administrators (n=115) completed an online survey with Likert-scaled items of potential types of satisfaction derived from participation as well as comments that were used to check the validity of the Likert-scaled items and allow participants to say in their own words why they were Wikipedian. Results showed that contributors in Wikipedia are driven largely by motivations to learn and create.

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