Externalities in Knowledge Production: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

TL;DR

This study uses a randomized field experiment on Wikipedia to investigate whether adding content influences future knowledge growth, finding negligible effects and implications for information seeding strategies.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that adding content to Wikipedia does not significantly affect future knowledge production or externalities.

Findings

Adding content has negligible impact on long-term content growth.

Externalities in knowledge production are minimal.

Implications for incentivizing contributions are limited.

Abstract

Are there positive or negative externalities in knowledge production? Do current contributions to knowledge production increase or decrease the future growth of knowledge? We use a randomized field experiment, which added relevant content to some pages in Wikipedia while leaving similar pages unchanged. We find that the addition of content has a negligible impact on the subsequent long-run growth of content. Our results have implications for information seeding and incentivizing contributions, implying that additional content does not generate sizable externalities by inspiring nor discouraging future contributions.