Like you and many others, I do find Wikipedia fun. (I have fun doing a lot of other things that aren’t building a public resource too, but I often choose to work on Wikipedia over those things.) So the question is, what about Wikipedia makes it fun? The answer must be “different things for different people”. For me, being part of building a public resource that so many find useful is part of the fun. (Maybe it’s fun for you and me to have our sense of altruism flattered?) If we want to stick with the language of fun, I think the things that influence what is fun for many people are the same types of things that influence player behavior in public goods games. This is just another way to think about the issue of contributor motivation.

But that’s the solution to a different problem from the fundamental public goods game situation. At root, even if the transaction cost is reduced to zero, we still want contributions that take effort. We want to reduce the amount of effort that goes into the machinery, the markup, the interface, but we still want people to put a lot of thought and effort into the content part. Even the simple act of rating an article (a feature that hopefully will be added soon) requires effort to meaningfully evaluate an article before selecting a numerical rating. For the kinds of contributions we need most, the transaction costs are small compared to the core costs of creating and editing content intelligently.

So the basic free rider problem will still be there, and experimental economics has shown that (in controlled laboratory situations, where transaction costs are basically the same for free riders and contributors) social factors of who you’re playing with and how you connect with them matter a lot, as do the rules of the game.

The experiments show what anyone familiar with Wikipedia already knows, that–contrary to basic game theory–people don’t always act strictly according to self-interested rationality. But people vary widely in terms of tendency to contribute to public goods, and responses to changes in the social environment and game structure vary widely too.

I’m sure that some non-contributors will start contributing if transaction costs are reduced (how many, and more importantly what the quality of their contributions will be, I don’t know). But others don’t contribute for some other reason (or multiple reasons), and there are many different changes that would draw different people.

I hope you feel better soon! I look forward to reading your post.

I’ve seen this used effectively on smaller, entertainment-related wikis in the form of profiles, forums, and recognition of high-level contributors.

Inequality aversion is a new concept, and the numbers seem to fit personal observations.

Interesting thoughts.

Becoming an established editor takes a surprisingly large investment of time and effort: people need to learn MediaWiki syntax, Wikipedia policies, Wikipedia jargon, and the unwritten rules inherent of any community. Reducing the cost of editing is (currently) as simple as taking out as many of those steps as possible. WYSIWYG editing could remove the cost of learning MediaWiki’s syntax (FCKeditor, anyone?), Wikipedia jargon can be pointedly avoided by the community, and Wikipedia policies can be simplified (or, if not, newbie guides can be written to quickly explain the essential points).

I have a whole blog post outline on what I’ve just wrote, in fact, but I’m coming down with some sort of illness and haven’t had the energy to flesh it out beyond its initial hierarchical-list form.