 
Subscribe

This is a preview of the full article

New Scientist full online access is exclusive to subscribers. Registered users are given limited access to content, find out more. To read the full article, log in or subscribe to New Scientist.

Home | News

Wikipedians are 'closed' and 'disagreeable'

Pictures of spreads from New Scientist magazine

DISAGREEABLE and closed to new ideas - that's the picture that emerges of Wikipedia contributors from a survey of their psychological attributes.

Yair Amichai-Hamburger at the Sammy Ofer School of Communication in Herzliya, Israel, and his team gave a personality test to 69 Wikipedia contributors. As he expected, the "Wikipedians" were more comfortable online than in the "real world". But he was surprised that contributors scored low for agreeableness and openness to new ideas, given that contributing to the website is based on sharing knowledge (CyberPsychology & Behavior, vol 6, p 679).

Amichai-Hamburger speculates that Wikipedians make their contributions online because they struggle to express themselves in social situations.

To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.

To continue reading this article, log in or subscribe to New Scientist

Print + web

  • Print
  • Web

$24.99

12 issues for $2.08 per issue

with continuous service

App + web

  • Web
  • Smartphone
  • Tablet

$21.99

12 issues for $1.83 per issue

with continuous service

Print + app + web

  • Print
  • Web
  • Smartphone
  • Tablet

$38.99

12 issues for $3.25 per issue

with continuous service

30 day web pass

  • Web only

$49.99

Prices may vary according to delivery country and associated local taxes.

© Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126883.900-wikipedians-are-closed-and-disagreeable.html
www.newscientist.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-42
25966
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:OYDQBRC6XVE2IOS7ZE5MQK7TZ3FCEAC4
<urn:uuid:096225a4-67dd-4427-bb4e-f8ed6a492d93>
2014-10-21T03:06:04Z
54.194.119.231
sha1:Z4UUWL5GZWDUOFEV6AGCVHR7ZKZGCNQF
<urn:uuid:8be2d7eb-b4ee-4088-96a8-5daca20061c0>
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126883.900-wikipedians-are-closed-and-disagreeable.html
length
response
<urn:uuid:3a903ebe-5c8f-4f9e-a241-b829015eb6ab>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-16-133-185.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-42
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for October 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf