The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Strategic decision · 2017
Jana Gallus kept new Wikipedia editors with a worthless badge
Jana Gallus ran a field experiment on Wikipedia, giving random new editors a purely symbolic barnstar badge, which boosted their retention by about 20%.
Jana Gallus (Wikipedia field experiment)
the move
Wikipedia loses the large majority of new editors within their first few contributions, and unlike a normal employer, it has no salary, bonus, promotion, or job security to offer as an incentive to stay. Every conventional retention lever a business would reach for — pay raises, career advancement, formal recognition tied to real-world identity — simply doesn't exist on a platform run by pseudonymous volunteers with no compensation of any kind.
Researcher Jana Gallus faced the challenge of testing whether recognition alone, stripped of every material benefit, could actually change behavior — a claim easy to state in the abstract ('recognize your volunteers') but hard to prove cleanly, since most studied awards carry at least some indirect career or reputational payoff in the real world that could be doing the actual motivating. Wikipedia's pseudonymous structure offered something rare: a way to test recognition in complete isolation from any material or real-world career benefit.
why it works
- The badge arrived when newcomers were deciding whether they fit in.
- Randomization isolated the badge's effect from recipient quality.
- The badge's pure symbolism ruled out material or reputational motives.
- The recognition signal directly answered the newcomer's need to feel valued.
what transfers
Even a zero-cost symbolic reward can retain volunteers if given at the moment they question belonging.
what came after
Awarded newcomers stayed active editors at a measurably higher rate than the unawarded control group — one account of the findings puts the increase in the following month's retention at roughly 20 percent — and the effect persisted for an extended period afterward rather than fading immediately, before eventually becoming statistically insignificant.
references
- Fostering Voluntary Contributions to a Public Good: A Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment at Wikipedia
- Jana Gallus on the Economics of Non-Financial Awards and How Editor Retention on Wikipedia Can Be Maintained
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