A preliminary study on the effects of barnstars on Wikipedia editing

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary study into the awarding of barnstars among Wikipedia editors to better understand their motivations in contributing to Wikipedia articles. We crawled the talk pages of all active Wikipedia editors and retrieved 21,299 barnstars that were awarded among 14,074 editors. In particular, we found that editors do not award and receive barnstars in equal (or similar) quantities. Also, editors were more active in editing articles before awarding or receiving barnstars.