Understanding individual motivations among members of online communities

Over the last three decades, the Internet has allowed people to connect, communicate, and share information on topics of interest. Websites and wiki-like sites have become the new libraries, active agoras for seeking and sharing information and knowledge. At the heart of this thriving knowledge commons are individuals who invest time and energy to create content and make it available online.

Intrigued by this behavior, scholars have extensively studied what motivates web-based knowledge community (WKC) members to share their knowledge. However, the results of these studies often consider community members as a homogenous population, particularly when it comes to understanding their motivations. Furthermore, emerging literature provides evidence of an uneven repartition within these communities of the workload involved in creating valuable content. A minority of the members create the vast majority of content, another small proportion edits and comments on existing content, while most members solely read the available content. Understanding what motivates the minority of individuals who make a large contribution is crucial to the survival and growth of these communities.