Motivate Online Community Contributions Using Social Rewarding Techniques - A Focus on Wiki Systems

Online communities have something in common: their success rise and fall with the participation rate of active users.
This thesis focuses on social rewarding mechanisms that generate benefits for users in order to achieve a higher contribution rate in a wiki system. In an online community, social rewarding is in the majority of cases based on accentuation of the most active members. As money cannot be used as a motivating factor others, such as status, power, acceptance, and glory have to be employed. Different social rewarding mechanisms are explained which aim to meet these needs of users.
Furthermore, four methods were implemented within the MediaWiki system, where social rewarding criteria are satisfied by generating a ranking of the most active members. These techniques refer to used references in an article, user votes, article visits, and user recommendations. In addition, this paper also focuses on the calculation algorithm the ranking of authors is based on, the implementation process of the development, and the use of adequate information visualization techniques to present results.