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.