
 

Abstract

https://ssrn.com/abstract=1980806
 
 

Citations (1)



 


 



Big From the Beginning. Assessing Online Contributors' Behavior by Their First Contribution.


Sylvain Dejean


CEREGE, University of La Rochelle; Centre de Recherche en Économie et Management (CREM)

Nicolas Jullien


Telecom Bretagne, iSchool; M@rsouin (Môle Amoricain de Recherche sur la Société de l'information et les Usages d'Internet)

April 27, 2015

Research Policy, Volume 44, Issue 6, July 2015, Pages 1226–1239

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.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 49

Keywords: voluntary participation, Wikipedia, survey, econometric studies, Probit, Heckman

JEL Classification: L17, L86, H41


Open PDF in Browser Download This Paper

Date posted: January 10, 2012 ; Last revised: April 27, 2015

Suggested Citation

Dejean, Sylvain and Jullien, Nicolas, Big From the Beginning. Assessing Online Contributors' Behavior by Their First Contribution. (April 27, 2015). Research Policy, Volume 44, Issue 6, July 2015, Pages 1226–1239. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1980806 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1980806

Contact Information

Sylvain Dejean
CEREGE, University of La Rochelle ( email )
La Rochelle, F-17042
France
Centre de Recherche en Économie et Management (CREM) ( email )
7 place Hoche
Rennes, Bretagne 35065
France
Nicolas Jullien (Contact Author)
Telecom Bretagne, iSchool ( email )
Technopole Brest Iroise
Brest, 29238
France
M@rsouin (Môle Amoricain de Recherche sur la Société de l'information et les Usages d'Internet) ( email )
France

Feedback to SSRN


Paper statistics
Abstract Views: 1,187
Downloads: 146
Download Rank: 159,124
Citations:  1
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1980806
papers.ssrn.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-09
75616
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KKC7UNTWJ3Z6FPBNSKYLDRJ2TU7G6U4F
<urn:uuid:e5d12316-2171-425f-ba97-912c5f2f4005>
2017-02-23T23:34:27Z
74.39.190.174
sha1:2IZXUVNPDPCUBD2EE4WOHELD2TFBOVW4
<urn:uuid:286247d3-571a-4e85-b2fd-a1a1b769ece0>
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1980806
response
<urn:uuid:dcbebac8-8a2c-4ce3-9428-e457a6a91921>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-09
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf