Incentives

Incentives

I would like some feedback on the idea that some creative thinking is needed about the incentives for people to contribute to Wikimedia activities. It seems that people contribute because of both cooperative and reputational incentives. Do you think that there is scope for encouraging participation and the quality of participation in these endeavours by examining both of these types of incentives more completely?

I have been wondering about the potential role for Wikiversity in particular to better capitalise on aligning these incentives.A system of statistics that kept track of contributions to the development of an online syllabus, and links between teaching materials with performance on online tests could help align cooperative and reputational incentives. For example, people have a reputational incentive to demonstrate their knowledge by achieving well on online tests provided via Wikiversity. If statistics are kept linking a person's use of various teaching material to their achievement on an online test, a reputational incentive is also created for teachers or lecturers to contribute to the development of useful teaching material online (Wikipedia pages?). This provides teachers or lecturers with a performance indicator, relevant to their employment.

Other performance indicators for lecturers as potential contributors would include statistics tracking whether their journal articles are cited in Wikipedia articles, Wikiversity syllabi and the like. Reputational incentives could be enhanced with statistics appearing on a person's Facebook status. Some creative thinking in this area could go a long way.

Anyway, I would be interested to hear others' thoughts about whether examining the incentives and creating new systems of incentives might help meet a number of strategic objectives .

Timcapon13:04, 25 April 2011