Economic Downturn and Volunteering: Do Economic Crises Affect Content Generation on Wikipedia?

Abstract

Die Dis cus si on Pape rs die nen einer mög lichst schnel len Ver brei tung von neue ren For schungs arbei ten des ZEW. Die Bei trä ge lie gen in allei ni ger Ver ant wor tung der Auto ren und stel len nicht not wen di ger wei se die Mei nung des ZEW dar.Dis cus si on Papers are inten ded to make results of ZEW research prompt ly avai la ble to other eco no mists in order to encou ra ge dis cus si on and sug gesti ons for revi si ons. The aut hors are sole ly respon si ble for the con tents which do not neces sa ri ly repre sent the opi ni on of the ZEW. AbstractIn this paper, we address the impact of surging unemployment on online public good provision.Specifically, we ask how drastically increased unemployment affects voluntary contributions of content to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We put together a monthly country-level data set, which combines country specific economic outcomes with data on contributions to the online encyclopedia. As a source of exogenous variation in the economic state we use the fact that European countries were affected by the financial crisis in the US in September 2008 with different intensity. For European countries, we find that the economic downturn is associated with more viewership, which channels higher participation of volunteers in Wikipedia expressed in editing activity and content growth. We provide evidence for increased information search online or online learning as a potential channel of the change in public goods provision, which is a potentially important side effect of the economic downturn.

Digital Economics

“…In the context of Chinese-language Wikipedia, they show that users care about audience size, and decrease contributions when part of the audience is blocked due to Chinese government policy. Consistent with this idea of a social benefit, Aaltonen and Seiler (2016) and Kummer, Slivko, and Zhang (2015) together provide evidence for a virtuous circle in which more editing leads to more views and more views lead to more editing. Contributions are likely related to the interests of the contributors: Wikipedia leaned sharply Democratic early on and has gradually become more neutral (Greenstein and Zhu 2012).…”

Digital Economics

“…In the context of Chinese language Wikipedia, they show that users care about audience size, and decrease contributions when part of the audience is blocked due to Chinese government policy. Consistent with this idea of a social benefit, Aaltonen and Seiler (2016) and Kummer et al (2015) together provide evidence for a virtuous circle in which more editing leads to more views and more views lead to more editing. Contributions are likely related to the interests of the contributors: Wikipedia leaned sharply Democratic early on and has gradually become more neutral (Greenstein and Zhu, 2012).…”

Externalities in Knowledge Production: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

“…More generally, the paper belongs to the literature that analyzes what drives contributions to user-generated content. 3 The topics addressed in the prior related literature include the role of personal gain (Shah, 2006), group size (Zhang and Zhu, 2011), networks (Fershtman and Gandal, 2011;Ransbotham, Kane, and Lurie, 2012), spillovers (Kummer, 2014), symbolic awards (Gallus, 2017), performance feedback (Huang, Burtch, Gu, Hong, Liang, Wang, Fu, and Yang, 2018), monetary rewards vs social motives (Sun, Dong, and McIntyre, 2017), contributor diversity (Ren, Chen, and Riedl, 2015), and economic conditions, such as unemployment (Kummer, Slivko, and Zhang, 2015) and migration (Slivko, 2018). More closely related to our work is Kane and Ransbotham (2016) who study the relationship between contributions and consumption of content.…”