Page 66 - Cyberculture and New Media

Sheizaf Rafaeli, Tsahi Hayat & Yaron Ariel 57
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Sangwan identifies a conceptual weakness in the exploration of possible
factors that motivate users to participate in virtual communities. In an attempt
to understand the success of virtual communities, Sangwan studied users’
motivations to become members in a fee-based knowledge community.
Satisfaction or gratification, according to Sangwan, is an ex-post evaluation
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of member experience with the community. Conceptualized gratifications
as a form of subjective evaluation, implies a contextualized perspective of
gratifications.
In this study, we attempt to identify the cognitive and social-
integrative motivators for Wikipedians’ active participation. Sangwan
identifies three key motivators for virtual community use: Functional,
Emotive and Contextual. These motivators represent various mixtures of
needs, but essentially relate more to information acquisition than to pleasure
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motives. Another example offered by Stafford, Stafford and Schkade who
suggest cognitive gratifications’ need for information acquisition as one of
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the principal motivators for virtual community usage.
Based on the theoretical framework presented thus far we offer three
research questions: (1) what are the personal motivations for participation in
Wikipedia? (2) What are the aspects of community characteristics that
Wikipedians demonstrate? (3) how do Wikipedians perceive the knowledge
creation process in Wikipedia?

6. Method
The data for this study were collected using an online web
questionnaire, which was posted in the “Community Portal” of the English
and the Hebrew Wikipedias (http://en.wikipedia.org and
http://he.wikipedia.org). The target population of this questionnaire consists
of highly involved Wikipedians. Using the answers received by the
respondents in their questionnaires, we managed to filter the active subgroup,
those members who edit Wikipedia entries at least several times a month. In
order to reach this population, our questionnaire was posted on a web page
dealing specifically with Wikipedia internal discussions about Wikipedia and
Wikipedians. Our assumption is that people who look into the Community
Portal page are Wikipedians who are actively involved in the Wikipedia
project. The sample used in this study included 120 Wikipedians, 85 from
The English Wikipedia and 35 from the Hebrew Wikipedia.
Our Likert-style questionnaire included a set of items regarding the
respondent perceptions of Wikipedia and other Wikipedians. The
questionnaire also included questions concerning the respondents’
demographical background and Wikipedia uses patterns.

7. Results
Following the main research questions, we present the Wikipedian