The Impact of Competition on Knowledge Production in Online Communities

Abstract

While online knowledge-production communities such as Wikipedia and Linux have proven to be successful, they often co-exist with commercial alternatives such as Encyclopedia Britannica or Microsoft Windows. Despite the prevalence of this phenomenon, we understand little about the impact of commercial competition on community-based knowledge production. We shed light on this question by investigating the impact of competition from Google Maps on OpenStreetMap, a digital crowd-mapping platform with over 3.2 million users. We exploit the differential timing of Google Maps’ entry in different countries to characterize how competition affects contribution activity. We find that (a) competition lowers contribution activity on OpenStreetMap, (b) has positive effects on contribution activity for veterans as compared to newcomers and (c) the negative effect of competition on contributions is mitigated in communities with strong leadership, distributed activity and loyal membership. Competition seems to be an important, yet overlooked, factor influencing contribution activity on community-based knowledge production platforms.