Disagreeable and closed to new ideas – that’s the picture that emerges of contributors to community-curated encyclopaedia Wikipedia from a survey of their psychological attributes.

Led by Yair Amichai-Hamburger of the Sammy Ofer School of Communication in Herzliya, Israel, a team of psychologists surveyed 69 Israeli contributors to the popular online encyclopedia, comparing them with a sample of 70 students matched for age and intensity of internet use.

All were given a short questionnaire called Real-Me, which tries to determine whether people prefer to express themselves in the real world or online, and a personality survey that gave ratings for five traits: openness to experience and ideas, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Internet living

As Amichai-Hamburger expected, the Wikipedians were more comfortable online. “They feel the internet is a more meaningful place to them,” he says. But to his surprise, although Wikipedia is founded on the notion of openly sharing and collecting knowledge as a community, they scored low on agreeableness and openness.


“Wikipedia in a way demonstrates the spirit of the internet,” Amichai-Hamburger says. “People contribute without any financial reward.”

Amichai-Hamburger speculates that rather than contributing altruistically, Wikipedians take part because they struggle to express themselves in real-world social situations. “They are compensating,” he suggests. “It is their way to have a voice in this world.”

This is consistent with previous research on online communication, says Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware in Newark, who suspects that heavy users of sites such as Digg and Twitter may have similar characteristics. “People who prefer online social behaviour tend to have higher levels of social anxiety and lower social skills,” he says.

A recent study of YouTube users also suggested that contributors – people that upload videos – have egocentric rather than altruistic motives. Users whose postings received more hits were more likely to continue uploading videos.

Amichai-Hamburger is now surveying users of social network Facebook to see if sites based solely on friendly social interaction attract a different, more agreeable, type of person. “That would be interesting,” says Caplan.

Journal reference: CyberPsychology & Behavior (DOI: 10.1089/cpb.2007.0225)