Economic Downturn and Volunteering: Do Economic Crises Affect Content Generation on Wikipedia?

In this paper, we address the impact of the economic downturn and a consecutive increase in unemployment on online public good provision. Specifically, we ask how the European economic crisis affected voluntary contributions of content to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We study this question on the country-level and on the level of German districts. First, we put together a unique monthly country-level data set, which combines country specific economic outcomes with data on contributions to Wikipedia. Our source of exogenous variation is the effect of the financial crisis in the US in September 2008, which affected the European countries with varying intensity. We find that the economic downturn is associated with more viewership, which channels higher participation of volunteers in Wikipedia expressed in editing activity and content growth. In a second step, we compare Wikipedia activity in affected and unaffected German districts, where we can track anonymous and registered edits and their timing. With higher unemployment first the number of anonymous edits increases and second the number of registered editors.