Social Rewarding in Wiki Systems

Online communities have something in common: their
success rise and fall with the participation rate of
active users. This book focuses on social rewarding
mechanisms that generate benefits for users in order
to achieve a higher contribution rate in a wiki
system (e.g., like Wikipedia). In an online
community, social rewarding is in the majority of
cases based on accentuation of the most active
members. As money cannot be used as a motivating
factor others, such as status, power, acceptance, and
glory have to be employed. Different social rewarding
mechanisms are explained which aim to meet these
needs of users. Furthermore, four methods were
implemented within the MediaWiki system, where social
rewarding criteria are satisfied by generating a
ranking of the most active members. These techniques
refer to used references in an article, user votes,
article visits, and user recommendations. In
addition, this book also focuses on the calculation
algorithm the ranking of authors is based on, the
implementation process of the development, and the
use of adequate information visualization techniques
to present results.

Autorentext

Bernhard Hoisl received a BSc and a MSc in Information Systemsfrom the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Since theend of 2008 he is a PhD student at the Institute for InformationSystems and New Media involved in an EU funded projectresearching in the area of Natural Language Processing andTechnology Enhanced Learning.

Klappentext

Online communities have something in common: theirsuccess rise and fall with the participation rate ofactive users. This book focuses on social rewardingmechanisms that generate benefits for users in orderto achieve a higher contribution rate in a wikisystem (e.g., like Wikipedia). In an onlinecommunity, social rewarding is in the majority ofcases based on accentuation of the most activemembers. As money cannot be used as a motivatingfactor others, such as status, power, acceptance, andglory have to be employed. Different social rewardingmechanisms are explained which aim to meet theseneeds of users. Furthermore, four methods wereimplemented within the MediaWiki system, where socialrewarding criteria are satisfied by generating aranking of the most active members. These techniquesrefer to used references in an article, user votes,article visits, and user recommendations. Inaddition, this book also focuses on the calculationalgorithm the ranking of authors is based on, theimplementation process of the development, and theuse of adequate information visualization techniquesto present results.