Social Network Analysis in Community-Built Databases - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 53

In the field of movies, the most important player is The Internet Movie Database
( www.imdb.com ) and contains information about more than 1,500,000 movie titles
and more than 3,500,000 people involved within the film industry. 2 Data about
music is gathered on the Discogs.com site, which provides information about artists,
albums, and songs, as well as being a marketplace for their exchange. A similar
scheme holds for collectors of almost everything (magazines at Kaastor.com, paper
money at Plaata.com, etc.).
Almost every popular car model has its own fan club with a Web site. Most of
these sites also contain discussion forums, where car owners discuss various issues
linked to a specific car model, thereby creating a CBD. Quality of this database
correlates with the popularity of a specific car model within the community of
Internet-oriented people (roughly speaking, more owners means more users creat-
ing more content) and also with the popularity of the Web site (more owners are
searching for specific information). Depending on the definition, we may also
consider many other services as CBD, often dedicated to sharing interesting things,
such as Digg ( www.digg.com ), Delicious ( www.delicious.com ), StumbleUpon
( www.stumbleupon.com ), and many others.
3.1.2 Common Features
When analyzing the largest successful CBD, we can see that most of them share
certain features based on social aspects. In the following sections, we discuss them
in greater detail.
3.1.2.1 Motivation
This is the cornerstone of success, because users add value [ 32 ], and users have to be
motivated to add value. This is not a big problem in a company environment where
users are paid for their work, but it is a key issue in systems based on volunteers.
Kuznetsov [ 24 ] summarizes the motivations of Wikipedia editors. According to
their study, the main motives are: altruism (users are working for the common good),
reciprocity (users are helping and expect to get help when needed), community
(users form communities and are acting as members of these communities), reputa-
tion (users can create a virtual identity which can be respected), and autonomy (users
are not restricted to a specific subject). Nov [ 31 ] in a similar study also mentions fun ,
career , and understanding (users think that contributing toWikipedia will give them
a new perspective on subjects and issues).
2 According to http://www.imdb.com/stats