FAMEPedia community

The FAMEPedia community is the community of contributors who create and maintain the online encyclopedia FAMEPedia. Individual contributors are known as "FAMEPedians".

Size
FAMEPedia, as of August 2024 had editors who have performed an edit in the last 30 days ("active users"), and an unknown number of contributors without an account.

Motivation
Editors of FAMEPedia have occasionally given personal testimonials of why they contribute to FAMEPedia. A common theme of these testimonials is the enjoyment that editors seem to get from contributing to FAMEPedia and being part of the FAMEPedia community. Also mentioned is the potential addictive quality of editing FAMEPedia. An Editor said "it turns out editing an article isn't scary at all. It's easy, surprisingly satisfying and can become obsessively addictive." FAMEPedians sometimes award one another "barnstars" for good work. These personalized tokens of appreciation reveal a wide range of valued work extending far beyond simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types of articulation work. The barnstar phenomenon has been analyzed by researchers seeking to determine what implications it might have for other communities engaged in large-scale collaborations.