Big from the beginning: Assessing online contributors' behavior by their first contribution

The objective of this paper is to investigate the process of involvement in open online communities producing knowledge, via the link between the first contribution and the level of contribution reached. While most studies consider the career of contribution following the first contribution, we focus on what happened before and during the first contribution. We challenge the fact that becoming a core member starts with peripheral contributive activities and results from a continuous learning process, as explained by the theory of community of practice. On the contrary, and coherent with epistemic community theory, our results, based on 13,000 answers to a survey on the use of, and contributions to Wikipédia, show that the future level of users' involvement depends on the period of time between the discovery of Wikipedia and the first contribution (negative effect), and of the effort made in the first contribution (positive effect). Implications for management are also discussed.