To Collaborate or Not? A Study of Motivations for Collaborative Knowledge Production in Cyberspace

Abstract

With the development of Web 2.0 era, Internet technology has undergone tremendous change, and collaborative knowledge production community (CKPC) came into being. Two key transitions of knowledge production community see an increase in user’s participation and a change in user’s participation pattern which resulted in a new knowledge production community—collaborative knowledge production community (CKPC). Once came into being, it attracted great concerns because of its ability to fully mobilize the user’s participation. The thesis focuses on main factors that contribute to user’s collaborative production motivation and the patterns and characteristics of collaborative knowledge production community from the perspective of self-determination theory combined with the internal motivation, external motivation, and basic psychological needs, and offers suggestion and countermeasures to the operation of the related CKPC, hoping to provide some references for the further research on CKPC. Drawing on self-determination theory, the thesis makes a comparative study of the three types of collaborative knowledge production communities to find the motivation factors that affect users to participate in the online knowledge collaborative production, hoping to serve as complements for the previous studies.