Building Community Knowledge In Online Competitions: Motivation, Practices and Challenges

Knowledge building is a prevalent feature in open online systems, while it is challenging to motivate participants to contribute and maintain quality in participants' contribution. Open online competitions, where participants compete with knowledge artifacts and quality contributions are being sourced, offer a potential design model for online system to increase contribution to community knowledge. However, it remains unclear how and why participants of online competitions contribute to knowledge shared by the community. In this study, through interviews with 14 participants of Kaggle Competitions, we investigated participants' motivations, practices and challenges when contributing to community knowledge under a competition structure. We found that competitive mechanisms impact expert and beginner participants very differently in their knowledge building behaviors. Experts contribute to shared knowledge in order to compete for reputation, while they tend to form their own niches and only share knowledge artifacts that are abstract and not usable by less experienced participants. Beginners are often driven away from contributing to shared knowledge because of their vulnerable social image and low visibility resulted from competitive mechanisms. We leveraged Scardamalia 's framework on Knowledge Building Community to discuss the different challenges and opportunities that competitive design brings to expert and beginner participants. We offer design implications for effectively implementing competitive mechanisms that could benefit both expert and beginner participants in future knowledge building systems.