A Preliminary Study on the Effects of Barnstars on Wikipedia Editing

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Kwan Hui Lim, Amitava Datta and Michael Wise

This paper presents a preliminary study into the awarding of barnstars among Wikipedia editors to better understand their motivations in contributing to Wikipedia articles. We performed a comprehensive web-crawl on the entire Wikipedia and retrieved 21,299 barnstars that were awarded among 14,074 editors. In particular, we found that editors do not reciprocate with (awarding) a barnstar upon receiving one. Also, editors were more active in editing articles before awarding or receiving barnstars.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

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