One obvious issue is that it would be unethical to award barnstars to contributors who did not deserve them. However, the 1% most productive contributors, by definition, deserved the barnstars that the experimenter awarded them. Awarding barnstars to undeserving contributors for experimental purposes probably would not have flown so easily by the ethical review board. As the article notes:
---------- This study's research protocol was approved by the Committees on Research Involving Human Subjects (IRB) at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (CORIHS #2011-1394). Because the experiment presented only minimal risks to subjects, the IRB committee determined that obtaining prior informed consent from participants was not required. ---------- This is my conjecture; I'd like to hear the author's comments. ~ Chitu -------- Message original -------- Sujet: [Wiki-research-l] Experimental study of informal rewards in peer production De : Joseph Reagle <[email protected]> Pour : [email protected] Copie à : Research into Wikimedia content and communities <[email protected]> Date : 26 Avril 2012 11:42:01 In this [study](http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034358): > Abstract: We test the effects of informal rewards in online peer production. Using a randomized, experimental design, we assigned editing awards or “barnstars” to a subset of the 1% most productive Wikipedia contributors. Comparison with the control group shows that receiving a barnstar increases productivity by 60% and makes contributors six times more likely to receive additional barnstars from other community members, revealing that informal rewards significantly impact individual effort. I wonder why it is limited to the top 1%? I'd love to see the analysis repeated (should be trivial) on each decile. Besides satisfying my curiosity, some rationale and/or discussion of other deciles would also address any methodological concern about data dredging. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
