What motivates Wikipedians: motivations for Wikipedia content contribution

Contributors??? motivations are critical for sustaining Wikipedia and other collaborative user-generated content outlets. Such outlets are based on contributions by people who volunteer their time and talent for the creation of content in return for no monetary reward. Therefore, in order to understand what underlies user-generated content contribution, we would need to find out what motivates volunteer content contributors. The results of a survey of 151 Wikipedia contributors indicate that the top motivations for contribution are Fun and Ideology. As expected, it was found that the levels of each of the motivations Fun, Values, Understanding, Enhancement, Protective, and Career were positively correlated with contribution level. Somewhat unexpectedly, contribution level was not correlated significantly with the Ideology and Social motivations.