Research:How role-specific rewards influence Wikipedia editors’ contribution/RFC

Research project: The effects of specific barnstars

I'm a researcher studying the effects of rewards on motivation. My team and I would like to run an experiment with barnstars on Wikipedia. We'll use data analysis to identify editors who are making substantial contributions to Wikipedia and we'll post barnstars on their talk pages. Our goal is to see if specific types of barnstars elicit different types of motivation reinforcement for an editor. For example, if we reward an editor for doing copy-editing work specifically, are they more likely to continue doing copy-editing work?

Our goal in all of this is to find effective strategies for increasing the long term retention of editors. To us, it appears that identifying way to motivate volunteers to stay and contribute is very important. For the continued viability of Wikipedia. And anyway, it's good to recognize people for their hard work.

I'm posting here today to announce the project and to invite you to highlight any potential issues with us posting barnstars. See metawiki:Research:How role-specific rewards influence Wikipedia editors’ contribution for our proposed study design. There, you can find our criteria for selecting editors to receive barnstars. We're interested in your insights. We're also very interested in working with anyone who would like to collaborate with us in this experiment. ~~~~