How important such effects are quantitatively is the empirical question that our research aims to address. A change in article content might influence other users by providing new information about a topic or by making potential areas for further contributions salient to them, thereby inspiring them to contribute further to the article.

Having a large pool of potential editors allows individual contributors to add small pieces of information to an article and rely on subsequent users to develop the content further. In contrast with traditional modes of production, it is in the nature of the Wikipedia production process for spillovers between users to occur. Our study analyses a central question in the context of open content production: Does individual content creation ‘spill over’ onto subsequent content creation by other users on the platform? Lessons from what makes Wikipedia successful can inform open-source projects and ‘wiki’-style platforms in a wide range of public and private sector organisations involved in research, education, and innovation. Rather than using a fixed set of procedures to arrive at a pre-specified output goal, open source is characterised by commons-based peer production, a process that is “decentralized, collaborative, and non-proprietary based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals” (Benkler 2006).ĭespite a rising number of products and online platforms relying on this type of production process, we still have relatively little understanding of what drives the growth of content in such environments. Wikipedia (and open-source production more generally) constitutes a marked departure from traditional modes of production within organisations. Wikipedia has largely displaced the former market leader, Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is based on a more traditional process of content production (Devereux and Greenstein 2009).

The online encyclopaedia contains almost 4.4 million individual articles in the English-language version alone, which have been edited by more than 20 million users since its inception in 2001. Wikipedia is the leading example of this type of joint production.

While some platforms of this kind are primarily used to share individually produced content, others are based on a more direct interaction between users in the production of content. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia are among the world’s most popular websites – and all of them are based on user-generated content.

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