Economic Downturn and Volunteering: Do Economic Crises Affect Content Generation on Wikipedia?

Konferenzbeitrag

In this paper, we address the impact of surging unemployment on online public good provision. Specifically, we ask how drastically increased unemployment affects voluntary contributions of content to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We put together a monthly country-level data set, which combines country specific economic outcomes with data on contributions to the online encyclopedia. As a source of exogenous variation in the economic state we use the fact that European countries were affected by the financial crisis in the US in September 2008 with different intensity. For European countries, we find that the economic downturn is associated with more viewership, which channels higher participation of volunteers in Wikipedia expressed in editing activity and content growth. We provide evidence for increased information search online or online learning as a potential channel of the change in public goods provision, which is a potentially important side effect of the economic downturn.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: Beiträge zur Jahrestagung des Vereins für Socialpolitik 2016: Demographischer Wandel - Session: Cooperation and Solidarity: Empirical Evidence ; No. F04-V2

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Production and Organizations: Other ; Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty: General ; Public Goods

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Slivko, Olga ; Kummer, Michael ; Zhang, Michael
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft
• (wo): Kiel und Hamburg
• (wann): 2016

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/145698
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:43 MEZ