Tested
Empower Connection
Increases retention & contagious prosocial behaviors
A stand-alone button, or reaction, that expresses thanks and gratitude.
Being assigned to receive thanks increased two-week retention of Wikipedia contributors by 2 percentage points on average for newcomers and experienced participants across communities (p < 0.001).
This works as either a react icon for when users may 'like' content, or as a stand-alone button beneath content.
According to a study by Cornell's Citizen & Technology Lab, they: "organized 344 volunteers over the last year to thank 2,702 contributors to Wikipedia in Arabic, German, Polish, and Persian languages." They found that organizing volunteers to thank others both increased two-week retention of newcomers and experienced contributors by 2 percentage points on average, and caused people to send more thanks to others by 43% on average.
Preprint
Interventional
Altmetric score
June 20, 2020
J. Nathan Matias, Reem Al-Kashif, Julia Kamin, Max Klein and Eric Pennington
Interventional studies cover experiments and quasi-experiments. In experiments, individuals meeting eligibility requirements are randomly assigned into an experimental group or a control group. The experimental intervention (protocol, method or treatment) and its alternative(s) are clearly defined and their implementation is closely managed by the researcher. Quasi-experimental studies are empirical studies in which subjects are assigned an intervention, by a non-random method. The researcher may define and manage the alternatives, which could be treatment and control, or two or more different interventions.
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