Big from the beginning: Assessing online contributors' behavior by their first contribution

Sylvain Dejean and Nicolas Jullien

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This paper aims at investigating the process of involvement in open online communities producing knowledge, via the link between the first contribution and the level of contribution reached. While most studies look at the career of contribution after the first contribution, we focus on what happened before and during the first contribution. We challenge the fact that becoming a core member starts with peripheral contributive activities and results from a continuous learning process, as explained by the theory of community of practice. On the contrary, and coherent with epistemic community theory, our results, based on 13,000 answers to a survey on the use and contributions to Wikipédia, show that the future level of users' involvement depends on the time between the discovery of Wikipedia and the first contribution (negatively), and of the effort made in the first contribution (positively). Implications for management are also discussed.

Keywords: Voluntary participation; Wikipedia; Survey; Heckman; Probit; Econometric studies; Epistemic community (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01162738v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Research Policy, 2015, 44 (6), pp.1226 - 1239. ⟨10.1016/j.respol.2015.03.001⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-01162738v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Big from the beginning: Assessing online contributors’ behavior by their first contribution (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01162738

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2015.03.001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().