"Why do you need 400 photographs of 400 different Lockheed Constellation?": Value Expressions by Contributors and Users of Wikimedia Commons

Understanding the values that collaborators bring to a collaboration is important for the design of new systems. In collaborative systems understanding differing values could help design solutions to mitigate conflicts and more effectively coordinate collaboration. We review prior studies of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) identifying four common value dimensions previously noted as present in CBPP: usage value, social value, ideological value, and monetary value. We use this synthetic framework to analyze a dataset of 32 interviews with contributors to Wikimedia Commons and editors of Wikipedia who use Commons resources. Our analysis supports the prior values categories while expanding how some dimensions are expressed by participants. We also highlight four additional value dimensions that were not previously identified in CBPP: cultural heritage value, rarity value, aesthetic value, and administrative value. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of collaborative systems.


INTRODUCTION
Lee has always loved airplanes.He participates in a hobby called plane spotting.The participants in this hobby try to spot individual aircraft, often, as they land or take off at airports.Lee brought his hobby to Wikimedia Commons by uploading 400 photographs of 400 different Lockheed Constellation airplanes with unique tail numbers.For his hobby, being able to identify these unique airplanes is valuable, but Lee also felt there was general value in documenting these individual airplanes.However, not all Commons editors and users appreciated Lee's contributions.They argued that having 400 photographs of individual Lockheed Constellation airplanes is a waste of space; some photos were not very good, it makes it hard to find quality photos, it distorts the category system, it creates burdens for archiving, and creates other problems.Their primary argument is that one high quality photograph of any Lockheed Constellation is good enough to illustrate that type of airplane.
The argument between Lee and his fellow Wikimedia Commons contributors demonstrates two value-based tensions between different perspectives on Commons.Lee's hobby, which can be seen as a personal value, seems to conflict with other contributors' views about the usage value of pictures in other Wikimedia projects and other types of reuse.As well, the usage value does not align with Commons community value of building a repository of discoverable media, which suggests that having multiple pictures of the same airplane is perfectly acceptable.Accounting for and supporting human values throughout the research and design process of complex systems has been a longstanding concern in HCI/CSCW [3,20,30,32,33,42].Prior studies found that understanding values plays an important role in technology design to support individuals and groups [3, 6-8, 10, 62].Investigating individual values is important for technology design to support individual needs, interests, priorities and decision making [3,7,8,10].As well, in a collaborative context, a clear understanding of values is critical for aligning priorities, coordinating interactions, mitigating conflicts, investigating alternative choices and moving toward the goals that are important to both the group and the individuals [6,10,62].
There are numerous challenges when studying values in complex systems.A common approach is to focus on one type of system where broad participation is important.Within HCI/CSCW some research has considered the values of participants who contribute to open source software and English (EN) Wikipedia [12,53,58,70] as examples of Commons-based peer production (CBPP).However, none of this prior work has provided a consistent analytical framework to handle the diverse value dimensions of CBPP [49].To address this gap, we consider Wikimedia Commons as an alternative CBPP in which we can consider a range of possible values that extend the prior findings.We first review prior studies of CBPP and synthesize value dimensions previously identified.We then apply our synthetic framework to analyze a dataset of 32 interviews with contributors to and/or users of Wikimedia Commons.
This paper makes three main contributions to HCI/CSCW.First, we contribute an analytical framework for investigating diverse values of CBPP while expanding how the value dimensions are expressed.Second, we extend the framework by adding four additional value dimensions that have not been identified in previous work.Third, we discuss complexities of values of CBPP and discuss technology design implications that accommodate the complexities that may better facilitate collaboration when contributors have conflicting values.
In the remainder of this paper, we first discuss the definition of "values" and cover prior studies in CBPP that include a discussion of some specific values.We then synthesize the values in an analytical framework to guide our data analysis.The majority of this paper illustrates the application of the synthetic framework to a set of interviews using a qualitative approach to the analysis.We follow up by discussing some implications of our findings for CBPP.

BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK
This study builds on two areas of research: efforts to understand values and their role in computing system research and design, and prior work in HCI/CSCW that investigates Commons-based peer production (CBPP).Our review starts with an explanation of Wikimedia Commons, a less well-known commons-based resource that is foundational to the many different language editions of Wikipedia.We then review how values are commonly defined and point out that many studies of values related to CBPP have biased to a focus on open source software development projects.Our literature review concludes with a proposed framework for analyzing CBPP based on what we know from prior studies and some of the broader literature that describes values.The proposed synthetic framework is what we then use to analyze our qualitative data later in the paper.

Definition of Values
In a general sense, value 5 denotes the concept of "the good", the significance of something or action.Value could be moral goods, or ethics that deal with the conduct of individual humans.It could also be natural goods that have to do with objects.Both moral goods and natural goods are equally relevant to value.
Individuals who focus on the study of values often consider that they fall roughly into five areas 6 : morality, aesthetic preference, human traits, human endeavor and social order.However, it is considered to be nearly impossible to get a comprehensive list or enumeration of values because each individual "holds numerous values with varying degrees of importance [62]."While one might not have a definitive list of all values, researchers have identified some basic values that are common across diverse human cultures; almost universal values [25,54].Through surveys of 25,863 respondents in 44 countries with a wide range of different cultures, Schwartz [61,62] identified 56 (now 57 [63]) human values that they placed into ten categories: self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence, and universalism.
Values have been an important concern in HCI/CSCW for many years [27].The community has a longstanding interest in accounting for and supporting human values throughout the research and design process [3,20,30,32,33,42].Although there is not clear agreement on the definition of values, the research community has widely adopted a definition from Friedman et al. [20] -"what a person or group of people consider important in life." Prior studies also generally agreed that values have some common properties.Values are not fixed [30].Values are contingent and are reflected in ongoing action.Expressions of values are a product of local contexts and lived experience [42].Studies in HCI/CSCW have investigated values of individuals as well as values in a collaborative contexts [3, 6-8, 10, 62].Studies have often found that understanding individual values is important for technology design to support individual needs, interests, priorities and decision making [3,7,8,10].Additionally, a clear understanding of values in a collaborative context is critical for aligning priorities, coordinating interactions, mitigating conflicts, investigating alternative choices and achieving goals important to both the group and the individuals [6,10,62].
Studying values and value expressions are important for research and design of collaborative systems.Prior research has outlined categories of human values that have been widely adopted in value sensitive design [20].However, there is still a lack of a consolidated analytical framework with which to understand the diverse value dimension and value expressions of CBPP [49].Our paper aims to address this gap.Our study is not a universal study of all values on all social media/collaborative systems.We focus specifically on CBPP.In the rest of the section, we conduct a systematic literature review of value dimensions that are explicitly identified, discussed, and designed for in prior HCI/CSCW research of CBPP.We then introduce two non-HCI/CSCW studies that consider diverse values within CBPP from a more quantitative perspective.Lastly, we synthesize values of CBPP discussed in these prior studies in an analytical framework to use for our subsequent data analysis.

Value Dimensions Identified in Prior Literature
We surveyed prior work and meta-reviews that employed similar approaches to understand the values of Commons Based Peer Production (CBPP) as well as methods that have been used, with a leaning toward the prior HCI literature [16,60].Our analysis began by constructing a corpus of papers that specifically discussed CBPP values.We initiated our search in the ACM Digital Library using two keywords: "Commons Based Peer Production" and "value."Each returned paper was carefully examined to determine if it explicitly addressed CBPP values.If it did, the paper was added to our corpus.Our criteria for an "explicit statement about values of CBPP," was based on the following factors: (1) Was the primary goal of the work directly related to CBPP?We excluded papers that focused on subjects such as designing machine learning algorithms leveraging CBPP resources, urban commons, disciplinary commons (DC) for teacher professional development, or peer-to-peer networking.(2) Did the work explicitly discuss values?Papers that presented implicit value propositions about CBPP, such as coordination, conflicts, rules, and decision-making, were excluded.(3) Did the work investigate the qualitative aspects of values associated with moral principles, ethics, and character traits?We excluded papers that primarily focused on measuring quantitative value, which pertains to measurable and numerical aspects such as download counts, edits, views, cost, profit, and efficiency.This analysis of ACM publications yielded four papers that met our criteria and were included in the corpus.We broadened our search beyond ACM publications, by considering results from Google Scholar using the same search terms and criteria.This search yielded six additional papers that met the inclusion criteria for a total of 10 papers that met our criteria.Considering the framing of the work and their contributions, eight of the papers were either published in HCI/CSCW-related venues or were authored by scholars conducting research in HCI/CSCW.The other two papers were published outside of the HCI/CSCW community.

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In the remainder of this section, we discuss the value dimensions identified in the eight HCI/CSCW papers.We will then address the value metrics of CBPP presented from the work outside of the HCI/CSCW literature in the next section.
A plethora of literature in HCI/CSCW has made implicit value propositions about CBPP.In this study, we focus only on literature that makes explicit statements about value to keep the amount of related work and concepts limited.Prior studies in HCI/CSCW that are interested in values, often identify a single value dimension as key to their results.These studies of values for CBPP have relied on Wikipedia and open software development projects as important CBPP platforms.Across these studies, our review found three important dimensions: reputational value, monetary value and values that play a specific role in motivating contributors.
Kriplean et al. and Adler et al. discussed the reputational value as social recognition in CBPP [1,40].This value dimension is an indicator of the value of content a contributor produces.Kriplean and McDonald further investigated Barnstars as a token of reputational value to reveal the range of acknowledged, valued contributions to English Wikipedia [40].
Studies also identified monetary value in CBPP [4,12,43,53,70].Research found that volunteers could achieve monetary benefits such as career development and direct payments [12,53,70].Researchers in the information economy discussed the monetary value of CBPP as well.They found the monetary value was exploited by technology companies for profit and therefore argued that the monetary value of contributions to CBPP should be made more transparent to mitigate economic inequity [43].
Moreover, researchers discussed values that play a specific role in motivating contributions to CBPP [12,53,70].Through a meta analysis of literature, Von Krogh et al. [70] identified three types of values that motivate contribution to open source software development including intrinsic motivations (e.g., ideology values like altruism, kinship and fun), internalized extrinsic motivations (e.g., usage value and social value), and extrinsic motivation (e.g., monetary value).Similarly, research of Wikipedia [53,58] showed that ideology values such as altruism and fun also motivate Wikipedians to produce content.

Value Metrics of CBPP
A small amount of prior work has attempted to develop an alternative matrix that translates value between the CBPP ecosystem and the market economy.These studies, somewhat outside the HCI/CSCW literature, consider values using a broader diversity of CBPP platforms and projects.Filippi [15] translated the value of Commons-Based Cryptocurrencies into a matrix that encompasses three value dimensions: functional value, social value and ideological value.Similarly, through a survey of 302 CBPP projects, Morell et al. [49] identified five values as indicators for measuring the value of a CBPP project.The five values are community building, objective accomplishment, monetary value, social use, and reputation.These two studies demonstrate a number of common value dimensions through a diversity of CBPP projects.They expand our understanding of values by including rarely-studied CBPP types such as Cryptocurrencies.These studies also illustrate the need for a more in-depth understanding of diverse value dimensions and value expressions across CBPP projects.Again, to be clear, the focus of this prior work is to link the values in CBPP to specifics of a market based economy to demonstrate the econimic value or economic impacts that CBPP are having.Our research here is not trying to understand the economic impacts of Commons.

A Synthetic Analytical Framework for Values in CBPP
We build upon prior CBPP studies, discussed above, by synthesizing value dimensions of CBPP they identified into an analytical framework.The initial framework includes four value dimensions, usage value, social value, ideological value and monetary value.Table 1 shows a brief definition

Usage Value
The usage or consumption of resources generated by CBPP, including the overall utility by society as a whole (social usage value [15,49,58]) and utility by the person who contributes it (own usage value [70]).

Social Value
Positive social experiences derived from the collaborative production/consumption of Commons-based resources.including the creation of a community (community building [49]) and interpersonal relationships (e.g., reciprocation of favors) [15,53,70].
of each value dimension along with references to the studies where the dimension was found and discussed.We use this synthesis as an analytical framework for our data analysis to compare the value expressions of Commons generated through our coding with the value dimensions and perspectives prior CBPP studies have discussed.Further, in later sections of this paper, we extend the framework to account for value dimensions generated by our analysis that are not present in the framework of Table 1.The final framework is presented in Table 4 of our Discussion section below.

METHODS
This study was conducted using qualitative interview and analysis methods.The procedures were reviewed by our local Institutional Review Board (IRB) and were determined to be 'exempt'.We followed the Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) recommendation to create a research project page on the Foundation Meta-wiki.This page described our project, outlined our procedures, and potential outcomes.The project page was reviewed by several editors who expressed interest in our research and asked specific questions about our procedures and goals.We answered those questions as best we could, and kept the project page updated throughout the research process.The project page currently includes a brief set of findings oriented toward WMF community members.Data for this paper was part of a broad study focused on understanding participants experiences editing and/or using Wikimedia Commons (aka 'Commons').The interviews were not focused around one kind of experience or one kind of work in Commons.Rather, it considered a wide range of contributions and tried to understand the diversity of experiences of the participants.In the following subsections we describe aspects of our methods, our recruitment and participant demographics, our interview protocol, and we describe how we analyzed the data.

Recruitment
We recruited two groups of participants: editors who primarily contribute to Wikimedia Commons, and editors who primarily incorporate content from Commons into Wikipedia articles.We identified potential participants through six different strategies including; the active users list of Commons, autopatrolled users list of Commons, Commons help desk, Wikiscan tool for English (EN) Wikipedia, Commons but also in using content from Commons to illustrate their projects.This approach allows us to adopt the best practice of investigating and evaluating value to "incorporate a plurality of perspectives on what constitutes value [52]." We have provided details about our six recruitment strategies in Appendix A.

Participants
We emailed a total of 235 editors through the six recruitment strategies listed above.Forty-seven of them replied to the recruitment email with 32 agreeing to participate in an interview.Table 2 shows a breakdown of editors contacted, replies received and participants interviewed from each recruitment strategy.All 32 editors who agreed to participate in the study finished a semi-structured interview with us.While we strove to recruit participants with diverse backgrounds, only five of these participants self-identified as a woman.While this is clearly skewed, the proportion roughly corresponds to the gender distribution of WMF projects' global editor population7 [28,41].During the interview, participants were asked to describe their experience with Wikipedia and Commons.Fourteen of them self-identified as committed to both projects, six mainly contribute to Commons (Commons Specialists), and 12 said they focus on Wikipedia and use content from Commons to illustrate articles (Wikipedia Focused).Two participants described themselves as "new contributors" to both projects.We further verified participants' self-identified project focus through their edits count on both projects.Table 3 shows the demographic information of the participants, recruitment strategy, self-identified project focus, and edit count cohort for both Commons and Wikipedia.Many of our participants contributed to both Wikipedia and Commons throughout their participation history.
We used edit count cohorts as a way of triangulating the participants' often self-stated main focal project.These qualitative cohorts were defined to avoid creating cohorts that might result in isolates that would make reidentification of participants trivially easy.As one can see from the table, sometimes participants claimed they were committed to both Wikipedia and Commons and other times they indicated their activity was more focused on just one of the projects.More often than not we found that a participant's statement about their commitment was reasonably well aligned with their relative edit counts.Our participants contribute from different geographic locations, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.While this was not an explicit recruitment strategy, our participants include some range of diversity to potential value expressions and in the findings.One interesting aspect of our participants is the number who edit in a language other than English (EN).While we did not explicitly seek to include participants who contribute in a non-EN language, we had eight who shared that they had contributed to non-EN language editions of Wikipedia as well as the EN Wikipedia.As well, we should note that several of our EN contributors lived in English speaking countries outside of the United States including Canada, Australia, and the UK.We also have seven English-speaking participants from five non-English speaking countries, Germany, Italy, Israel, Czech and China.
For each participant interviewed, we acknowledged their time and effort by making a $15 contribution to one of three "like-minded" organizations, Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons or Internet Archive.At the conclusion of each interview we asked the participant to which organization they would like us to make a donation.In total, we donated $225 to the Wikimedia Foundation, $75 to Creative Commons, and $180 to the Internet Archive.

Interview Protocol Development
We developed separate interview protocols for editors recruited through English Wikipedia and Commons.Our interview protocols was developed over several weeks with several rounds of piloting to clarify questions and improve the flow through the protocols.Our protocols was motivated by our desire to, as best possible, focus the participants on the actual work they had contributed to Commons or used to illustrate their own project.As a type of virtual, peer production system, our protocol was motivated by the ethos of contextual inquiry [29].
The interview protocol for editors recruited through Commons (Appendix B.1) had three parts.The first part included introductory questions where we asked about how the participant got involved with Commons and how long they had been contributing.The second part was focused on examples of their editing and contribution activity.Prior to each interview we reviewed the participant's editing history on Commons looking for sample contributions that were likely to spur discussion about values.We did not use a specific selection standard.A contribution could be selected because the item was heavily edited, or because it was heavily used, or because it was very recent or because it was a type of contribution that we had not seen before.We selected contributions that were no more than two years old because the context of older contributions might be harder for a participant to recall.We collected between four and six examples for each participant.In the second part of the interview these examples were shown to the participant and we asked questions that prompted them to tell us about the contribution and the work they were doing.During the third part of the interview we asked the participant about the relationship between Commons and other WMF projects such as Wikipedia.
Similarly, the interview protocol for editors recruited through English Wikipedia (Appendix B.2) had three parts.In the first part, we asked about the participants experience with contributing to English Wikipedia.In the second part, we reviewed the participants editing history on EN Wikipedia and identified four to six edits in which they had used an image from Commons to illustrate an English Wikipedia article.The edits should be less than two years old for better recall of the usage.We showed the participants the edits and asked them how and why the images were selected.In the last part, we led the participants to talk about the relationship between Commons and other WMF projects.

Data Collection and Analysis
We conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with the participants following our interview protocol.The interviews were conducted through each participant's preferred teleconference application such as Zoom, Skype, and Google Hangout.The interviews took between 35 -100 minutes and were video recorded upon participants' consent.All of the participants completed the entire protocol.We were able to control some of the interview duration by discussing fewer examples in the middle portion of the interview.
All of the interviews were transcribed, and in cases where the participant gave us additional examples of their work, we reviewed or collected them.The analysis and interviewing were interleaved as the project got started.In the early phases of the work both authors conducted open-coding of the transcripts to understand what was happening and whether the interview protocol was generating insight beyond what is already known about Commons.As the research progressed, the themes derived from open-coding of additional interviews became less novel and became more consistent.At the end of the interviewing effort we felt that we had largely saturated our themes for this specific protocol.
The interview data is quite rich.We note that the results described below are the results of our efforts to understand the way that participants describe the "value" of Commons.Based on our initial thematic codes we saw some participants talking about the "value" of Commons or the "value" of their work, or "value" of a piece of media.This preliminary insight caused us to reconsider our interview data to look for the different ways that participants expressed their concepts of value and what those value concepts were.We met weekly to review existing themes for expressions of values and reread the transcripts to identify potentially overlooked values expressions.Our coding was concomitantly informed by our readings of prior literature on values related to CBPP and our efforts to understand our data.
We did not make analytical distinctions between values around the contribution to and use of Wikimedia Commons.This is because in practice, it can be challenging to define values for these two groups in isolation.Prior research [15,70] has shown that contributors of CBPP are often users themselves, with both groups often being regarded as a homogenous cohort of participants.Similarly, Table 3 in our study shows significant overlap between contributors and users of Commons resources.All participants in our study had contributed to both Wikipedia and Commons at some point, with varying levels of focus on each platform.Participants who were more focused on contributing to Wikimedia Commons are considered to lean towards the contributor side, while those with a stronger focus on incorporating Commons resources into Wikipedia articles are considered to lean towards the user side.By including values related to both contribution and usage in a single framework, we aim to create a more inclusive framework that can accommodate a variety of individual perspectives and levels of involvement.In an attempt to let readers see potential differences, we have included the annotation "(primarily contributes to Wikipedia)" or "(primarily contributes to Commons)" or "(contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia)" after the pseudonym of every quote extracted in the paper.

Values Are a Complex Thing
One needs to be careful when studying values.As a researcher one needs to be reflective about whose values are being seen in the data -your own or the participants?Values do not exist in isolation.In fact we often see participants talking about several different values in the same statement.In some cases they explain the importance of one value by expressing it in relation to another.An example is probably most helpful to illustrate this point.A participant of our study, Arlo discussed three value dimensions when explaining the importance of a particular image on Commons: I mean, I guess that if a photo is used in a lot of articles on Wikipedia, or wiki source, ... whatever, and a lot of articles and other languages, then I guess it's important.But there are also photos that are used in very few articles or not at all . . .Like recently I heard about the project from Indonesia, from the island of Bali.There is a language there called Balinese and there are ancient manuscripts in this language.They look really unusual.They look very special ... I think they write on, like very narrow leaves [or] something like that.And it looks really beautiful.I don't know a word [in] this language, but some organization in Indonesia made a big project to scan all these manuscripts and upload them to commons.So this is amazing, right?Like, very few people will even understand what is written there.But it's a beautiful thing is like it's it's a collection of historically and culturally important things.It probably won't be used in a lot of Wikipedia articles, but storing them in a public accessible place.It's It's wonderful.So just because it's not used on Wikipedia articles, doesn't mean that it's bad.quite quite the contrary.it's amazing.-Arlo (primarily contributes to Wikipedia) In this case, Arlo discussed three value dimensions, usage value (in orange text), aesthetic value (in green text) and cultural heritage value (in blue text).Arlo did not make any analytical distinctions among these value dimensions.Or they did not think about making a distinction as they talking about these values.Instead, the values were all related and discussed one after another.Fluidly moving among different values was commonly found in participants' value expressions.It demonstrates that values are often connected and rarely completely discrete.Although we acknowledge that values are not completely separable, in our analytical activity, we try to dissect participants expressions, isolate the values, and conveniently label them as separate.This provides some clarity to the expressions and analytical control over the data.
As we analyzed our data we realized that participants talked about value and values in different and interesting ways -some participants would affirm a value dimension while others might disaffirm the same value dimension.One participant might talk about a value and make it clear it was important to them or that they believed it was important to Commons or Wikipedia.A different participant might mention a value and then state that it was unimportant.These seemingly contradictory statements are actually quite helpful.First, while one might affirm a value and the other disaffirm it, the important aspect is that both participants put the concept of the same value in relation to Commons.That tells us that the value is recognized and somehow understood by both as relevant to Commons.As analysts it tells us that the value concept is something we observed.The second thing that these two participants are telling us is that the value concept they were identifying may be a source of potential conflict, that different people see things differently.This is also valuable from our analytical stance.
Qualitative study results are often the interpretations of qualitative researchers.The goal of providing quotes, examples, and concrete data in a research paper is to allow the reader to estimate the validity and fidelity of the qualitative researchers' interpretations.When studying 'values' one could naturally ask whose values are represented faithfully in the study -those of the participants or the those of the researchers.The two researchers who conducted this study come from distinctly different social backgrounds.One who grew up in a society with more 'eastern' values and one who grew up in a society with distinctly 'western' values.Further, our literature review makes specific efforts to cover a broad and diverse space of sensitizing concepts for the values we might observe through our study.Our initial synthetic values framework reflects a clear attempt to state specific interpretive landmarks that can be easily traced through prior work.Our positionality in this study is also dependent upon the results and statements of prior work.Either our broad coverage of the prior work and our statement of the synthetic analytical framework provides a clear basis for understanding what values are at play in this study, and the dimensionality of those values, or covering any prior work is largely pointless.That said, it is, of course, always possible that the values of the researchers have influenced which values are identified and included in the final results.
We now turn our attention to describing our analysis and our results.

RESULTS
The value expressions of Commons generated through our coding include all four value dimensions of the analytical framework, but with their own unique implications on Commons.We also found four additional value dimensions grounded in our data that were not clearly identified in prior work that studies CBPP.In this section, we first discuss the four value dimensions from the framework in Table 1 (above), followed by the new dimensions that emerged from our data.Our final values framework is presented in Table 4 of our Discussion section below.

Usage Value
The usage value of a Common-Based Peer Production (CBPP) project is derived from the consumption or usage of resources it generates to fulfill human needs [15,49,70].Previous studies have found that the usage value of some CBPP projects, such as open-source software development and Wikipedia, is apparent and serves as an essential extrinsic motivation for contributors [70].For example, millions of readers use Wikipedia daily to satisfy a wide range of information needs, making it one of the most visited sites on the internet [58,64] This demonstrates the usage value of Commons; however, our analysis highlights a challenge in comprehending the usage value of certain Commons resources.It is difficult to predict the future contexts of media usage.Unlike open software communities such as FLOSS 8 , Commons has a loosely defined project scope 9 , and anyone can contribute freely licensed multimedia files to the repository.Consequently, a significant amount of Commons content was generated without a clearly identified use or reuse context in mind.As Jasper noted, it may take years for the future usage value of "a whole load of stuff within Commons" to become apparent: There will be a whole load of stuff within Commons, which is either the use isn't obvious to lots of people . . .and in an awful lot of it. . . the potential use isn't that obvious to many other people and may not be for years to come.-Jasper (contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia) The difficulty in predicting the future usage value of certain Commons resources has led to debates over which resources should be retained.Some participants have proposed removing resources that lack clear usage or future value in order to reduce storage, curation, and maintenance costs.This would also alleviate the strain on the overburdened Commons category system and make useful content more accessible: . . .I think It should encourage people to upload photographs that may have some use for a Wikipedia project....And maybe if a photograph is not used, then it will be deleted at some stage. . .I mean, if we have 800 pictures of the lion, then . . .we probably only need about 50. . .Otherwise. . .you never find the best picture of a lion, because the categories are too complicated.-Christopher (primarily contributes to Commons) On the other hand, we found that participants like Frank disagreed with this suggestion.They argued that it is unfair to ask contributors to decide the future usage value of their contributions and trim it down accordingly.Frank used a collection they contributed to as an example to demonstrate how difficult it is for contributors to predict the future usage value of their own contributions:

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There are about three occasions I can recall, where suddenly, those amateur photographs of that particular aircraft with this airframe number became important.And that was, of course, when those aircraft crashed. . .And suddenly, that photograph of that airplane that we were hosting on Commons appeared in newspapers and all over the place, because it was the only freely available photograph they could find of that exact aircraft.And people would say, why do you need 400 photographs of 400 different [airplanes]?Well, each aircraft is unique.And any one of those aircraft might be the one where a wing drops off one day, you know. . .that turns out to be quite important.But from the perspective of use on Wikipedia, yeah, we only need one really good photograph of a [airplane].But, you know, different usage.-Frank (primarily contributes to Commons) Frank shared 400 photographs of 400 different airplanes with unique tail numbers.Not all Commons editors appreciated Frank's contributions.Some argued that Frank's collection should be trimmed down to a smaller number of images that help illustrate that type of airplane.Frank disagreed because they cannot predict which images are going to be valuable in some specific future contexts.
English Wikipedia has community rules such as the WP:SCOPE10 essay and WP:NOTABILITY11 guideline that help contributors decide what knowledge should be included and maintained in the encyclopedia.However, Commons policies and guidelines around these concepts are currently more flexible, open to individual interpretation, and potentially contentious.

Monetary Value
Monetary value indicates the market value of resources generated in CBPP and potential personal gain such as career development and pay of individuals from participation in CBPP.Prior studies [53,70] found that the monetary value, or the potential to receive monetary value is an important motivator for participation in CBPP.However, in our study, we found that the Commons community views this value dimension somewhat differently from what we saw in the prior work.
One might assume that Wikimedia Commons lacks monetary value due to its departure from the traditional supply and demand rule observed in conventional markets, as pointed out by Gale [21].Resources within Commons are not commodified; instead, they are freely available for anyone to use.Additionally, contributors to Commons are not motivated by market pricing; their coordination is driven by voluntary sharing and collaboration among peers.However, it would be incorrect to assume that Commons holds no monetary value.During our interviews, participants delved into the monetary value of Commons resources and the potential financial benefits and career advancements associated with participating in Commons.
We found several participants acknowledged the monetary value associated with Commons resources.According to the Wikimedia Foundation 12 , all media files on Commons can be used by anyone, including for commercial purposes.This accessibility prompts individuals and companies to incorporate Commons images into their products, leading to financial gain, as Arthur (who contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia) pointed out: "If you need a picture for a T-shirt... or anything else... you can use Wikimedia Commons." Furthermore, some participants reported personal monetary benefits resulting from their contributions to Commons.For instance, Jiminy mentioned that one of their pictures, which they contributed to Commons, brought them "a lot of money" in return: I had a picture of [American singer and songwriter] performing and he was like down in a tiger kind of crouch.And it ended up on a billboard and both he and I got a lot of money for that one.-Jiminy (primarily contributes to Commons) Moreover, some participants highlighted how participating in Commons contributes to their career development.Andy, an active contributor who has made over 100,000 edits on Commons, shared their experience as a full-time researcher specializing in structured data.They explained how their engagement with Commons informs the formulation of their research question and shapes their research trajectory: Like where do we bring value to these 65 million media files that are impossible on wikipedia in their organic, natural state. . .and really turn them into something that has impact.Because . . .it's a huge repository. . . in terms of value and effort. . .but the way that it stores metadata and the way you can use the metadata. . .you can be part of the community that uses metadata is. . .not very successful, like the social design is not there.So I wanted to figure that out.-Andy (contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia) Our findings revealed that, despite deviating from conventional market dynamics, Wikimedia Commons holds both monetary value of resources and the potential for financial benefits and career advancements for its participants.However, it is important to note that our participants reportedly are not motivated by monetary value, like Marlon (who primarily contributes to Wikipedia) said, Commons contributors believe "It's very bad" to monetize Commons resources.As well, many participants explicitly stated that their contributions to Commons serve as a means to pursue a career or hobby that "didn't make any money": I retired, I was a management consultant and an engineer.When I retired, I decided I needed another career.One that didn't make any money.-Christopher (primarily contributes to Commons) Our participants seemingly put less importance on the monetary value of Commons -individually and collectively.This is somewhat different from previously studied CBPP projects, mostly related to open source software.This raises a question about design principles made to motivate participation in CBPP by emphasizing (potential) monetary gain of individuals and CBPP projects.

Social Value
The social value of CBPP lies in the social interactions involved in producing and utilizing resources in CBPP [15,49,53,70].Participants in a CBPP project interact with each other through various channels for coordination purposes such as strategic planning, rule-making and maintenance, enforcing policies and guidelines, and addressing conflicts [34,38,69].Studies have found that social interactions, often characterized as indirect work that does not lead to new content, play the same important role in CBPP as direct work [38,69].Not all social interactions in a CBPP project are amicable and conflict-free.In fact, many of them involve arguments and conflicts as seen in edit wars on Wikipedia [11].However, these negative social interactions are equally important to CBPP as they help resolve disagreements, establish consensus, clarify issues, and strengthen shared understanding [18,38].
Prior research has identified social value as a significant internalized motivation for participants in CBPP.Participants value social interactions for a sense of collaboration, community, and stronger interpersonal relationships [15,49,53,70].However, our study found conflicting sentiments toward this value dimension among Commons participants.While some participants believe that social value has a positive effect on their experience with Commons and motivates their contribution, others do not appreciate this value dimension.For example, Grace, a newcomer to Commons, explained their reasons for contributing to Commons: Wikimedia Commons people have been really helpful and friendly and supportive.So I would like to collaborate more.-Grace (contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia) Grace's statement highlights the value of social interactions for their participation in Commons and how it motivates them to contribute.They also expressed their desire to collaborate more with others in the Commons community.However, other participants, such as Winston, have a different perspective.When asked the same question about why they contribute to Commons, they shared that they migrated from the English Wikipedia to Commons because they did not appreciate the emphasis on social value in EN Wikipedia: Things are less conversational on Wikimedia Commons ... I make a fair amount of edits, but it's very rare that something I did requires a tremendous amount of interaction with other editors.I feel like I pick away at what I think is important at any given day, and then, you know, that's pretty generally solitary, editing for myself.-Winston (primarily contributes to Commons) Winston dislikes the social interactions required for editing Wikipedia articles because they believe that these interactions, as indirect work, distract them from contributing directly to new content.Therefore, they migrated to Commons, which allows them to work "solitarily" on content creation.This difference in social interactions between Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons aligns with findings from research on different Wikimedia projects.Studies show that social interactions play a more significant role in Wikipedia than in its sister projects, such as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, as manifested by editors' remarkably frequent usage of pages for indirect work (e.g., article talk page, user page, user talk page, policy and guideline page) on Wikipedia [38,56,69].This difference is caused by Wikipedia's emphasis on consensus formation, where only one version of the same claim can be kept in an article [59].To form a consensus, Wikipedia editors are required to engage in discussions with other editors, which can sometimes lead to "edit wars" caused by conflicting viewpoints.However, Wikidata and Commons have adopted a more liberal approach that allows different versions of the same claim to co-exist [46,57,72].Users can investigate the sources and judge which version they accept.
Despite the contradicting sentiments about social value among participants, Commons is able to accommodate both groups' needs.Editors who value social interactions can engage in collaboration and discussion, while editors who prefer to work independently are able to focus on direct content creation.

Ideological Value
The Ideological value of CBPP includes both community ideological values that are endorsed by the CBPP community and personal ideological values that motivate individual participants.The community ideological values a CBPP supports can usually be found in the project's charter.For example, the GNU community endorses "freedom" and "liberty" 13 and the Wikipedia community values "openness" and "being neutral" 14 .Similarly, Wikimedia Commons has a charter that defines the project, "a collection of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute" 15 .This charter reflects the ideological values the Commons community holds: sharing and open knowledge.
In addition to the community ideological values, we also found personal ideological values that motivate individual participants of Commons.The personal values mentioned most frequently by our participants are sharing, free and open knowledge, enjoyment, self-improvement, and learning.
Prior research [55] characterized ideological values as a static attribute of CBPP and its participants.The study revealed that individuals who shared a close alignment between their personal ideological values and the values endorsed by the CBPP community were more likely to sustain participation and contribute to the community.This finding is consistent with the experiences reported by many of the participants in our study.For example, when we asked Grace why they contribute to Commons, Grace explained that Commons values of free and open knowledge align closely with their personal belief in accessible and free knowledge: I am a semi-retired educator.And I really believe in the whole Wikimedia movement.I believe very strongly that education should be accessible.And that knowledge should be free whenever possible.So it was a philosophical thing.-Grace (contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia) However, our study also reveals the evolving nature of both personal ideological values and community ideological values of a CBPP.Throughout their participation in Commons, Frank gradually realized the value of supporting diversity and inclusion.Frank's newly adopted personal ideological value was initially not endorsed by the community as they found Commons policies and guidelines were not written in gender-neutral language.Frank led a policy change to improve the representation of gender queer people in the community: So Commons' policies are now in gender-neutral language.And that's become a sort of policy change.This is becoming gradually more popular, but we get a lot of negative voices thinking this is political correctness and so on.But as part of my role in establishing Wikimedia LGBT, of course, the opportunities there is to do more to recognize genderqueer people and make that more present on our projects.-Frank (primarily contributes to Commons) Frank's policy change was supported by their colleagues.As a result, the Commons community now endorses diversity and inclusion and rewrote their policies in gender-neutral language.The fact that Frank could make this change demonstrates that the values a CBPP community supports are not fixed for all time, and that the alignment between personal and community values can be worked out.However, shifting community ideological values is a double-edged sword.Frank said they "get a lot of negative voices" from other participants who did not value diversity and inclusiveness.
In the above, we have discussed four value dimensions of the synthesis framework we summarized from prior studies.Next we will discuss values grounded in our data that are not clearly identified in the prior framework.

Cultural Heritage Value
Besides the four value dimensions we discussed above, participants reported that Commons has cultural heritage value.Cultural heritage is a selection of tangible and intangible assets that are inherited from previous generations [44].These assets could be archaeological sites, customs, beliefs, indigenous knowledge, practices, sculptures, paintings, drawings, and manuscripts [65].Cultural heritage assets should possess remarkable universal value when considered from historical, architectural, commemorative, aesthetic, ethnological, and anthropological perspectives [45].Moreover, they actively contribute to the identity, sense of belonging, and collective memory of communities and nations.Cultural heritage assets are often preserved by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, also known as GLAM 16 institutions or CHIs (Cultural Heritage Institution) [35,36].Some assets can also be maintained by the group and/or community in which they originated.In Commons, participants create and share photo documentation of these cultural heritage assets.As well, GLAM and CHIs contribute their digital collections to Commons for open research [35,36].
Upon analyzing the data, it became evident that the cultural heritage value of Commons is less appreciated than other value dimensions discussed in this paper.While the aesthetic aspect of cultural heritage value can be readily identified and appreciated, other significant aspects of the value such as historical, architectural, commemorative, ethnological, or anthropological meanings often require specialized training to comprehend and recognize.As a result, our findings indicate that professionals such as librarians, archivists, museum curators, Wikipedians, and researchers can easily grasp the cultural heritage value of Commons.However, participants without professional training in cultural heritage reportedly tend to appreciate the value of Commons' cultural heritage primarily in relation to its aesthetic value.
We found that the cultural heritage value of Commons is particularly relevant and significant to cultural heritage professionals, such as librarians, archivists, museum curators, Wikipedians, and researchers.Prior research on Commons and cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) has shown that these professionals have always identified and appreciated the cultural heritage value of Commons [35,36].By contributing their digital collections to Commons, CHIs have almost unanimously experienced various benefits, including increased awareness of their websites and digital libraries, greater remote and in-person consultations about the collections, increased public participation in curation and enrichment, higher usage in class materials, as well as increased reuse of cultural heritage materials in new creations.
Similarly, our research uncovered that Wikipedians recognize and appreciate the cultural heritage value of Commons.The presence of archives and collections showcasing cultural heritage assets on Commons substantially enhances and bolsters the credibility of Wikipedia.James, an avid contributor to Wikipedia on topics related to art and history, elucidated the crucial role of reliable illustrations available on Commons in the process of crafting informative and accurate Wikipedia articles: For me... it's absolutely crucial...There are some articles I don't bother writing, because we don't have the image.Articles on a particular work, an individual work.I'm not going to write it unless there's an image, at least one image... -James (contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia) Additionally, academic researchers value Commons cultural heritage content due to the newfound ability to access previously hard-to-find or even concealed collections for open research.Rory, for example, highlighted how making a cultural heritage image available online would greatly assist history researchers with an interest in the Scout Movement, "I can see a Scouter, wanting to research the history of the founders... might like to see the sign." Professionals like librarians, archivists, museum curators, Wikipedians, and researchers demonstrate a clear ability to comprehend the cultural heritage value of Commons.However, comprehension of this value dimension may be limited for laypeople without the necessary training to understand its historical, architectural, commemorative, ethnological, and anthropological significance.Instead, our findings indicate that many participants acknowledged and appreciated the cultural heritage value of Commons primarily in relation to its aesthetic value.For instance, Arlo cited the aesthetic value of a cultural heritage image to explain its importance: Recently I heard about the project from Indonesia, from the island of Bali.There is a language there called Balinese and there are ancient manuscripts in this language.They look really unusual.They look very special ... I think they write on... very narrow leaves.
And it looks really beautiful... Very few people will even understand what is written there.But it's a beautiful thing.it's a collection of historically and culturally important things.-Arlo (primarily contributes to Wikipedia) Arlo candidly admitted that they did not possess the necessary training to fully grasp the intricate language and contextual nuances captured within the cultural heritage document.Nevertheless, they acknowledged the document as an "important thing" due to its aesthetic value, "it looks really beautiful".This observation implies that while the cultural heritage may not be immediately evident to everyone, its value can be recognized and appreciated through its interconnectedness with other value dimensions of Commons.
Despite the cultural heritage value of Commons being less accessible than other value dimensions, our analysis highlights its remarkable significance to various user and contributor communities.Furthermore, even for individuals who do not possess expertise in cultural heritage, this value dimension contributes to the overall value of Commons by enriching more readily apparent dimensions, such as aesthetic value.

Rarity Value
Our participants talked about the rarity value of Commons.Unlike in a traditional economy where rarity value derives from limited access, the rarity value of Commons originates in making a resource more accessible.This is a bit ironic, because the nature of making something more accessible is nearly opposite of the definition of rarity.But 'rarity' is the way that Commons editors describe this value.
Being rare means something occurs seldomly, is difficult to find, or is difficult to observe.Artifacts, events, and images can all be rare.Time can also influence whether something is considered rare.Even something that is relatively common can become rare when access is severely restricted.For example, diamonds are a form of carbon, one of the most common elements on Earth, but because of restricted and controlled access, they are considered "rare" with an associated perception of high monetary value.In Commons, a rare image could be an image that depicts an artifact or event that is seldom occurring or found.It could be an image of a subject (e.g., person, monument, or event) that no longer exists.It could also be an image to which access is restricted almost everywhere else besides Commons, where it is freely accessible.Participant Max gave an example of a rare image they contributed to Commons: I discovered that there wasn't a good picture of [a sea floof] anywhere on the internet.And it was one picture of a dead [sea floof] on the seashore, upside down.Not [a] very good picture.And that was the only one.I was ... in ... a local aquarium...And I saw that they had a tank with [sea floof]...And the only thing in the tank was sand, nothing at all.But [to] the man who was there looking after it, I said, oh, do you mind if I take photographs.And he said no one would like to take a picture of a [sea floof].That's because they spend all their time buried in the sand.That's how they live.And he got up a pen or something and dug ... to get it to the top of the sand.So I took a very quick picture through the glass ... .I'm quite happy with this photograph.And I think it's still the only picture of [sea floof] anywhere on the internet.-Max (contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia) The sea creature that Max documented is not rare.But a picture of that animal, alive and lying on the seashore, is considered rare because it spends most of its life buried in sand, which it rarely leaves.Max had a great opportunity to capture an image with the help of an aquarium staff member, and they believed that image was the only free picture of that animal alive "anywhere on the internet." So they believed that the image was valuable.
Interestingly, in a market economy, the value of a rare item derives from limited access.For example, the value of a particular vintage of collectable wines can be increased by distributing only a limited amount in circulation.Therefore, it will take more time and money for collectors to get the wine.But Commons works quite the opposite way.The rarity value of commons does not come from limiting access.Instead, it is a result of removing restrictions such as copyright and paywall that other stock image websites impose on public access.For example, Frank described how they "harvested" an internet archive of high-quality images before the archive changed to a policy that might limit free use: ...I wrote a program just to harvest all of these images from Unsplash, before they change the license. . .If I hadn't uploaded them on mass... there would have been a debate about whether it was really free or not... and that debate would keep on happening.So this was a way of dealing with a copyright problem.And a way of getting a lot of good quality content available very quickly.-Frank (primarily contributes to Commons) Unsplash is a website where photographers share their original work.Content on this website is considered rare because it is original, in "good quality", and not findable from other places on the internet.Prior to a policy change, Unsplash allowed free access and usage of its content.However, when a new copyright policy was introduced, Frank was concerned that it could create additional restrictions on access and usage of the content.This could potentially require internet users to spend more time and effort dealing with copyright issues, or even pay for access to the content.To preserve the free and open nature of the content, Frank "harvested" Unsplash content before the policy change and shared them on Commons, ensuring that they remain freely accessible to everyone.This action highlights the value of rarity in Commons, as it strives to remove copyright restrictions and make rare resources more freely available to all.

Aesthetic Value
Participants reportedly identify aesthetic value from Commons.But we found contradicting expressions of this value dimension among participants.Some participants believe that the aesthetic value is important for motivating contributions and attracting public attention to Commons.Other participants diminish its importance for a conflict between aesthetic value and usage value.
Aesthetic value deals with beauty and the judgment of beauty.Images that have aesthetic value reportedly please the aesthetic senses of people and arouse their positive emotions.These positive feelings reportedly motivate participants' contribution to Commons, like Arlo explained: I walk around and see something nice and think something nice, something beautiful, something interesting, I take a photo and, and you know, everybody has a camera these days in their pockets.-Arlo (primarily contributes to Wikipedia) Arlo enjoys contributing pictures of "nice", "beautiful", or "interesting" things.Arlo further explained that sharing highly aesthetic images not only pleases contributors, but also helps draw positive public attention to Commons.Arlo used a picture of "the huge two crows" as an example.The picture was the winner of Commons Picture of the Year competition in 2016 17 .Arlo stated: There's also the photo of the year, which actually receives a lot of attention from the media.Like people write about this.And like there was this famous photo of the huge two crows.That was a famous one from a couple of years ago.Yeah, so that's nice, right?It's beautiful.It's good for some media attention.-Arlo (primarily contributes to Wikipedia) Aesthetically pleasing images like this one draw the media's attention to Commons, which is something the community desires for attracting more views, usage, and contributions to Commons.However, not all participants we interviewed appreciate the aesthetic value of Commons as some of them identified a conflict between aesthetic and usage value.George explained this conflict when discussing why Featured Images should not be the most valued type of work in Commons: Featured is a lot more about, you know, an intuitive, it's got a really look nice.It's really got to grab your interest in that type of stuff.Whereas these are the technical side of the images where they've just got to be photographed properly so that they are usable.-George (contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia) George expressed their view that while Featured Images may have high aesthetic value, they may not necessarily have high usage value.They explained that many Commons users, including himself, prioritize creating or contributing images with high usage value, as they provide technical details that are necessary for making good illustrations.According to George, the focus on aesthetic value in Commons may compromise the repository's overall usage value.They suggested that instead of emphasizing the aesthetic value of images, Commons should prioritize the usability of its content to better serve its users.

Administrative Value
Last but not least, participants identified the administrative value of Commons, which refers not to the resources produced in Commons, but to the policies and guidelines the Commons community created to regulate production.These policies and guidelines are reportedly valuable because they benefit not only the Commons community, but also users of Commons and other peer production projects Commons supports.
The Commons licensing policy is a widely discussed example that demonstrates Commons administrative value.Commons licensing policy is an example-based tutorial that helps lay people understand complicated copyright laws.The policy is reportedly valuable for the Commons community in that it helps editors judge whether a contribution is acceptable, as Frank explained: It's a free casebook of evidence, rather than debating copyright law, which people love to do.Much more useful to say, here is a file or image or some text, is it copyright?Or isn't it?Can we host it?Or can't we?And if we can't host it, where else should it be?-Frank (primarily contributes to Commons) This helps eliminate conflicts and arguments caused by different interpretations of complex copyright laws among Commons contributors.Additionally, the policy is reportedly valuable for users of Commons because it makes Commons resources more reliable for reuse: I think initially, we found that some people on Wikipedia got a bit cross with Commons, because they found that the images were just being deleted.They didn't know why they were being deleted.So it needed a bit more structure and some definite rules.It shouldn't just be deleted because an administrator doesn't think this is a good picture.So it has become a bit more formal.But I think that helps because it makes it more reliable.-Max (contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia) As Max explained, the licensing policy defines situations in which an image should be taken down by administrators.It avoids situations where images were taken down from users' projects arbitrarily for non copyright issues.Additionally, the licensing policy is reportedly valuable for other peer production projects Commons supports.These projects will not have to "recreate the wheel", creating their own licensing policies.Instead, contributors reference Commons licensing policy to address arguments around copyright in another project, as Frank described how Commons serves as the "main place" for copyright in the entire Wikimedia ecosystem: I would say there's tremendously more expertise about copyrights that's developed at Commons than there is at Wikipedia.People at Wikipedia can tell when an article is plagiarism.But beyond that, they don't know a great deal about copyright as a rule.Yeah, Commons is probably the main place where expertise about copyright resides in the Wikimedia ecosystem.-Frank (primarily contributes to Commons) The administrative value of licensing and copyright not only takes place on Commons but also affects other Wikimedia communities.It is worth noting that this is not the only value dimension of Commons that has second-order effects.As we have discussed, there are other value dimensions of Commons that affect its sister communities.For example, the cultural heritage value of Commons enriches and increases the credibility of Wikipedia by providing trustworthy illustrations for Wikipedia articles.Similarly, the social value of Commons has an impact on the participant characteristics of Wikipedia, as we found that some participants migrated from Wikipedia to Commons because contributing to the latter requires fewer social interactions.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
Prior literature in CSCW/HCI has identified a few value dimensions of Commons Based Peer Production (CBPP) such as monetary value, ideology value and social value.Through qualitative interviews with 32 contributors and users of Wikimedia Commons, this study contributes to our understanding of the values of CBPP in two ways: We synthesized value dimensions discussed in prior work in a value framework and we extended the value framework by adding four additional value dimensions that we found in Commons.
Our results have potentially broad implications to CBPP beyond just this study.Compared with its sister project Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons has not received much attention from researchers.However, the literature shows an increasing interest in studying Commons [37,46,47].As well, there is growing interest in the study of other CBPP multimedia repositories such as the Digital Commons [9,67], Internet Archive [2,5], and the Commons on Flickr18 [13,48,68].We believe our results make an important contribution to this growing line of research by providing a framework for values that is critical for community research and design.
In the following subsections, we will reflect on the analytical framework for values in CBPP, summarize our extended values framework based on our findings, and describe the implications of our work for designing systems that accommodate a range of participant values.Finally, we will discuss the limitations of our study.

Analytical Framework for Values in CBPP
In this study, we developed an analytical framework to synthesize the value dimensions that have been previously discussed in research on CBPP.Using this framework, we compared the value expressions of Commons generated through our thematic coding with the value dimensions and perspectives in prior CBPP work.We found that all four value dimensions (usage value, social value, ideological value, and monetary value) of the analytical framework were present in our participants' value expressions.However, we found that each of these four value dimensions has unique implications on Commons.For example, previous research has suggested that social value is a significant internalized motivation for participants in CBPPs like Wikimedia.However, some participants in our study expressed that social value had a negative impact on their experience with Commons, and they preferred to work in solidarity.Similarly, while monetary value has been found to be important for participation in Open Software Development projects, we found that the Commons community put less emphasis on this value dimension.These findings have important implications for CSCW and HCI researchers.We suggest using the analytical framework as a starting point to investigate different perspectives on the commonly identified, discussed, and designed-for value dimensions across different CBPP communities.Doing so will aid in assessing the effectiveness and generalizability of specific technology designs in supporting diverse CBPP communities.For instance, designs that promote collaboration and community-building have been found beneficial to the Wikimedia community [51], which values social value, while the same designs might be unfavorable to the Commons community, where social value is not appreciated.

Extension to the Value Framework
Relying on the synthetic framework of value dimensions derived from the prior work was insufficient to characterize the type and range of value expressions being made by our participants.We found four additional value dimensions that were important to our participants: rarity value, cultural heritage value, aesthetic value, and administrative value.We want to note that although these additional values were not discussed in previous studies of CBPP, they are not new to our understanding of human values.Some of them are closely related to the universal human values identified by Schwartz [61][62][63].Cultural heritage value resides in Schwartz' value category of tradition.Aesthetic value corresponds to the universal values of pleasure and a world of beauty.And administrative value is associated with social order value.While rarity value is not identified as a universal value by Schwartz, it has been widely used by economic research to explain the value of natural goods in market economies [39].Thus, there seem to be a great deal of face validity to the additional values we found in our data.It seems reasonable that our participants express these values as they have clear connections to the broader corpus of values that had not been previously identified with studies of CBPP.
We believe that we were able to identify four additional value dimensions from Commons because Commons differs in two ways from the CBPP communities prior work investigated [53,70].First, as we have discussed in Section 4.1, Commons scope of building a repository of free multimedia files seems much broader and open ended than creating functional software or writing Wikipedia articles of predefined, notable subjects.Second, Commons resources are multimedia files with many differing media types rather than source code files (text) or encyclopedic articles (mostly text).Our study highlights the importance of exploring value dimensions in CBPP communities beyond those commonly discussed in the literature.By identifying four additional value dimensions in Commons, we demonstrate that there may be more to consider when designing systems to support CBPP than previously thought.This finding suggests the need for further investigation into the unique values of diverse CBPP communities, which could help assess how well a CBPP system design is tailored to the needs and values of their users, identify areas that require improvement, and highlight areas where the design is performing well.
Furthermore, we extended the analytical framework by incorporating the four additional value dimensions we identified.The extended values framework is presented in Table 4.The framework can serve as a valuable tool for CSCW/HCI researchers seeking to comprehend and support diverse values within Wikimedia Commons [37,46,47], as well as other CBPP communities that center on producing and sharing digital content, such as the Digital Commons [9,67], Internet Archive [2,5], and the Commons on Flickr 19  [13,48,68].Nonetheless, the applicability of this framework to other forms of CBPP is uncertain.To assess the validity of the framework for use in other CBPP communities, CSCW/HCI researchers can conduct further empirical studies to test its generalizability.This could involve applying the framework to other CBPP communities and comparing the results to those obtained in the Wikimedia Commons study.It could also involve conducting interviews or surveys with participants in other CBPP communities to validate the identified value dimensions and explore whether there are additional dimensions that are particular to various kinds of CBPP communities.

Understanding Values of CBPP
Based on our initial inquiry into the prior literature covering values in CBPP, we synthesized an analystical framework with four value dimensions: usage value, social value, ideology value, and monetary value.We used this framework to carefully consider how and where our participants were discussing values.That is, how they expressed their ideas about values and what they saw of those in Wikimedia Commons.Considering what we saw in the data, we see three distinct issues that make understanding values in CBPP challenging.
First, this study shows that individual values could differ from community values.The community endorses values that are shared by the majority of its participants.However, values a participant holds could be different than values of the community.For example, Commons is interested in the usage value of resources as its charter 20 clearly states that Commons is a free multimedia repository for anyone to use.But we found individual participants contributed media, often images, that do not have significant usage value.Instead they contribute for individual values such as fun and mental exercise.Similar discrepancies can arise when different values and criteria are used to prioritize work within a community.In the case of Wikipedia, previous studies [23,24,71] suggest that the usage value of an article (i.e., how many people have read an article in a given time period) should be a key factor in prioritizing work, as the community is interested in pageview statistics 21 .However, recent research [31] has shown that other criteria, such as historical significance and cultural importance, are more frequently discussed among individual editors when deciding which articles are considered "Vital" for the encyclopedia.In a CBPP project, individual participants can hold values that are important to them but not shared or endorsed by the community.How a community resolves this values contradiction is important to maintaining the community as an active endeavor.
Additionally, it's important to note that community values could contradict each other.As we've previously discussed, the Commons community places a significant emphasis on the usage value of resources.However, the community is also concerned with supporting the aesthetic value of media resources.Various programs within the community, such as Picture of the Year 22 and Featured pictures 23 , actively encourage the submission of visually stunning and attractive images.Nevertheless, the usage value and aesthetic value sometimes contradict each other, as some of our participants have pointed out that visually pleasing images may not necessarily serve the technical requirements for effectively illustrating articles.It's worth emphasizing that one value does not ultimately "win." They co-exist in contradiction within the community.
Designing to support value contradictions within CBPP poses a significant challenge.As mentioned earlier, we have identified two types of contradictions in our data that continue to coexist.When a design fails to acknowledge these contradictions and instead favors a subset of values, it can result in conflicts among contributors, who engage in ongoing arguments about the relative importance of different values.Such a design approach might also disengage contributors whose cherished values are not prioritized, potentially leading them to withdraw from the community.Moreover, it could compromise the overall value of the CBPP since contributions embodying conflicting values may no longer coexist.Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of values and value contradictions in a CBPP is crucial when designing to effectively support the community.
Second, we found participants contribute to Commons for different individual values and sometimes values held by different participants could contradict each other.In our study, there were participants who appreciate social values and the social experience Commons provides.But there are also participants who migrate from Wikipedia to Commons because Commons has lower emphasis on social value which allows them to work independently.The current design of Commons allows both types of participants to work despite the contradiction in their individually held values.Some prior studies have promoted design implications that aim to foster a single value dimension.This approach could compromise the contradicting values that are important to a diverse set of contributors.For example, prior study that designs to enhance social experience for newcomers [50,51] might not work for people who are interested in Wikimedia projects but appreciate working independently.Designing for the experience of participants must be sensitive to diverse values individual participants held [19,73].
Third, the values a community holds can shift over time.Our study revealed that the values of a CBPP community are not static -they are not fixed or set for all time.In fact, the community's values can change as demonstrated by Frank who led a policy change that favored a different value.However, this policy change was a double-edged sword and encountered resistance from some editors of Commons.Previous research [26,66] has demonstrated that changes made to enhance a CBPP community can eventually lead to its decline.For instance, the Wikimedia community implemented stricter quality control systems, algorithmic tools for rejecting contributions, and policy calcification to improve its quality, consistency, efficiency, and stability in the face of massive growth.However, these changes had the unintended consequence of reducing the retention of newcomers and contributing to the decline of the community [26].Similar patterns have been observed in other active CBPPs [66].Therefore, we suggest that future CSCW/HCI research should examine how changes in community values impact a CBPP community, particularly regarding participant retention and contributions over time.Prior research [14] has shown that changes in participatory norms within an online community can influence the participation longevity of some users.Users who do not adapt or respond to shifts in participatory norms may gradually distance themselves from the community, resulting in eventual abandonment.Similarly, when there is a change in community values, participants may choose to leave or reduce their involvement, potentially leading to adverse effects on the overall well-being of the community.
One last complexity that seems clear from our data, is that different CBPP communities could interpret the same value dimension differently.This may seem obvious upon reflection, but the way prior work considered CBPP and the presentation of values suggests a type of fixed interpretation of a named value that we could not find.Our participants were more fluid in their descriptions of values and it seems to be inherently an analytical convenience for researchers to categorize similar ideas as the same.This perception of fixed interpretation is assisted by a focus on one type of CBPP as the origin for a values framework.For example, our understanding of usage value is actually quite different from the way it is presented in prior work [49,70].The usage value of an open software project often refers to current usage by the contributors or the society as a whole, but in Commons, contributors argued that this value dimension needed to be extended to include potential usage in future contexts.Our participants argue for usage value that is slightly different in its actual definition.Therefore, design solutions to enhance the value of one type of CBPP project might not be generalizable to other types as they are biased towards the specific communities they investigated.
Some prior work has sought to build systems or promote design solutions that make particular assumptions about the value system in CBPP.One example that stands out because of the way

Usage Value
The usage or consumption of resources generated by CBPP, including the overall utility by society as a whole (social usage value [15,49,58]) and utility by the person who contributes it (own usage value [70]).

Social Value
Positive social experiences derived from the collaborative production/consumption of Commons-based resources.including the creation of a community (community building [49]) and interpersonal relationships (e.g., reciprocation of favors) [15,53,70].
Cultural Heritage Value Importance of capturing, preserving, and providing access to significant aspects of culture and history for the general public and posterity.

Rarity Value
Benefit of making resources that are considered as "rare" more freely available.

Aesthetic Value
Aesthetic senses and positive emotions aroused from the production and/or consumption of CBPP resources.

Administrative Value
Value of policies and guidelines created by CBPP.
our participants talked about the associated values is that of reputation systems [1].While it does not claim to be a value system, a reputation system is designed to prioritize one or more values over others.Many reputation systems prioritize usage value or social value, sometimes both, over other possible community values.A reputation system makes interesting assumptions about the values that underlie participation in CBPP.The diversity of values held by our participants and the community uncovered by our study raises questions about specific design features and how they intersect with value systems.Future research might take different value dimensions of CBPP and their relationships into account to improve the reputation systems.

Limitations
Our study recruitment focused on English-speaking editors of Wikimedia Commons and editors of the English language edition of Wikipedia.This limits the language diversity of our analysis.While six participants reportedly contributed to a few of the most popular non-English editions of Wikipedia (e.g., Spanish, Italian, French, Czech, and German), we were not able to cover all 300+ language editions of Wikipedia especially the less well-known and understudied editions.
To extend our analysis, future study might interview non-English speaking contributors and/or users of Commons for more diverse value expressions.Additionally, We limited Commons users to editors that belong to (have an account on) at least one of the Wikimedia projects for the convenience of recruiting.We acknowledge that Commons content is used outside of Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) projects.Although some participants discussed using Commons resources for their personal projects.Future study could extend our study by including more casual users that specifically use Commons resources outside of WMF projects.Moreover, in this study, we did not differentiate between the values associated with contributing to and/or use of media in Commons and Wikipedia.We acknowledge that individuals may place different importance on these activities, and studying them separately could yield valuable insights into the motivations and priorities of Commons contributors and users of its media resources.Our review of the prior work on FLOSS and related CBPP had not distinguished between values of the contributors as distinct from the users of the software resource, and likewise our study was not designed specifically to tease apart these perspectives.Future research should address this key distinction by employing approaches that explicitly separate values of contribution as distinct from those of use across all types of CBPP.
Potentially, this could be achieved by designing specific interview protocols or survey instruments that are tailored to capture the unique perspectives and considerations associated with each activity.

CONCLUSION
In this paper, we synthesize four value dimensions of CBPP discussed in prior literature, usage value, social value, ideological value, and monetary value.We use the synthetic framework to analyze a dataset of 32 interviews with contributors and users of Wikimedia Commons.We extend the framework by adding four value dimensions grounded in our data that were not clearly identified in prior work.They are cultural heritage value, rarity value, aesthetic value, and administrative value.Moreover, we discussed how value dimensions could contradict each other and the complexities in understanding and designing to accommodate a range of participant values.Our work demonstrates the complexities of values in CBPP and the importance for researchers and designers of CBPP to get a comprehensive understanding of values and design to support value contradictions.

A.1 Commons Active Users List
The Active User list 24 is a Special Page that shows curators on Wikimedia Commons who have made more than 10,000 edits in the last 30 days.The first author manually checked the user page of the top 200 most active curators from the list and selected 81 of them who self-identified as a native English speaker or who indicated that they were able to contribute with a nearnative/advanced/intermediate level of English.

A.2 Commons Autopatrolled Users List
The Autopatrolled Users List 25 shows possible candidates for autopatrolled status on Wikimedia Commons."Autopatrolled is a user right given to prolific creators of clean articles and pages in order to reduce the workload of New Page Patrol.Articles and pages created by autopatrolled editors are automatically marked as "reviewed" or "patrolled" in the system."We use this list to recruit prolific commons curators who were nominated as contributing high-quality content by the community.

A.3 Commons Help Desk
The Help Desk 26 is a community page where individuals can go to ask questions and attempt to have problems resolved.We recruited less experienced curators by considering the individuals who were using the Help Desk to ask what appeared to be basic questions.The first author read through recently archived threads posted on Commons Help Desk and identified curators who asked questions about contributing to Commons in English.The first author checked their Commons user page and contribution page and selected 43 of them who made at least 5 contributions in the last two years.
A.4 Wikiscan Tool for English Wikipedia Wikiscan 27 is a tool that shows edit statistics of Wikimedia projects and their contributors.To identify EN Wikipedia editors who have used content from Wikimedia Commons to illustrate Wikipedia articles, we use Wikiscan on EN Wikipedia to find editors who made "File:" changes most frequently.The first author manually checked the contribution list of the top 300 editors and invited those who used at least five images from Wikimedia Commons to illustrate articles in their most recent 2,500 contributions.

A.5 English Wikipedia Featured Article List
We manually checked the edit history of articles in EN Wikipedia's Featured Article archive for 2019 28 .We identified editors who made the most recent imagery change to the featured articles and checked their contribution list.We invited editors who used at least three images from Commons in the last two years.In this way we could reach out to editors who have used content from Commons to illustrate Wikipedia articles but not as frequently as users we identified from Wikiscan.

A.6 Snowball Sampling
At the end of each interview, we asked participants to recommend one or two Wikimedia Commons curators and/or EN Wikipedia Editors who we should contact and potentially interview.We pointed out that we were interested in a diverse range of participants (e.g., non-native English speakers, female editors, controversial figures...)

B INTERVIEW PROTOCOL B.1 Participants Recruited through Wikimedia Commons
Opening Script Hi! I'm <Researcher 1 self-introduction, Introduce Researcher 2>.Today I'd like to talk with you about your experiences working with Wikimedia Commons.I have a set of questions that outline our conversation, but I'll also ask follow-up and clarification questions.
I want you to know that your participation in this study is completely voluntary.If at any time you would like to stop, just tell me and we will stop the interview.Also, if there is a specific question you would prefer not to answer -let me know and I will move to the next question.
With your permission I'd like to audio record the interview.The only people who will have access to the audio recording are me and my advisor.We will transcribe the interviews and erase the recording.
In case of poor network connection during the interview: If my connection drops, please stay on line and wait for at least five minutes for me to rejoin the interview; If your connection drops, please try to rejoin the interview using the same URL/Meeting ID.I'll wait for you for up to five minutes for you to rejoin.If we cannot resume our interview in five minutes, I will contact you to reschedule the interview.I'll email the details to you.
It is our practice to make a good faith effort to maintain the confidentiality of this interview.We will not tell outsiders that you were part of this research.We'll do our best to anonymize the data. 27 Hi!I'm <Researcher 1 self-introduction, Introduce Researcher 2>.I would like to talk with you about your experiences using Wikimedia Commons.I have a set of questions that outline our conversation, but I will also ask follow-up and clarification questions.
I want you to know that your participation in this study is completely voluntary.If at any time you would like to stop, just tell me and we will stop the interview.Also, if there is a specific question you would prefer not to answer -let me know and I will move to the next question.
With your permission, I would like to audio record the interview.The only people who will have access to the audio recording are me and my advisor.We will transcribe the interviews and erase the recording.
In case of poor internet connection during the interview: If my connection drops, please stay online and wait for at least five minutes for me to rejoin the interview; If your connection drops, please try to rejoin the interview using the same URL/Meeting ID.I'll wait for you for up to five minutes for you to rejoin.If we cannot resume our interview in five minutes, I will contact you to reschedule the interview.I'll email the details to you.
It is our practice to make a good faith effort to maintain the confidentiality of this interview.We will not tell outsiders that you were part of this research.We will do our best to anonymize the data.However, we feel it is important to tell you that we know that Wikipedians sometimes figure out who and what is being described, even though we have worked to anonymize the data.Do you have any questions for me before we start?<Start recording . . .Turn on the recorder> Just for the record, is it ok for us to audio record your interview?Phase 2: Tasks and Activities As part of our effort to find people to interview we reviewed lots of contributions to Wikipedia.I would like to show you some of the images you used to illustrate Wikipedia articles and ask you some questions.I'm going to paste a URL into the chat that will link to the first example.I'm also going to share my screen so 8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software9https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scopeProc.ACM Hum.-Comput.Interact., Vol. 7, No. CSCW2, Article 303.Publication date: October 2023.

Phase 1 :
Wikipedia Participation Q1: Tell me, how long have you been editing English Wikipedia?Q2: How has your work in English Wikipedia changed over time?Follow up: What did you contribute to Wikipedia when you started?Why did you choose to contribute to Wikipedia?What types of work do you do now?How would you describe the difference between what you worked on when you started and what you are working on right now?Why did things change?

Table 1 .
Synthesis of value dimensions identified in prior studies

Table 2 .
Recruitment strategies and the number of editors contacted, replied and interviewed from each strategy

Table 3 .
Participants' demographic information . Similarly, the usage value of Commons is demonstrated by the variety of Wikimedia projects and individual users who rely on its resources for illustrative purposes, as Authur stated:... the first one is to support Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects by being the image repository for those projects.But the other thing, and to some people this is more important. . . is a repository of free media for anybody to use.If you want a picture to put on a T shirt or your own blog, or your academic paper or . . .just to print out and put on the wall to look nice.You can use Wikimedia Commons.-Arthur (contributes to both Commons and Wikipedia)

Table 4 .
Extended and elaborated values framework based on our findings https://wikiscan.org/28https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Today%27s_featured_article/2019Proc.ACM Hum.-Comput.Interact., Vol. 7, No. CSCW2, Article 303.Publication date: October 2023.However, we feel it is important to tell you that we know that Wikipedians sometimes figure out who and what is being described, even though we have worked to anonymize the data.Do you have any questions for me before we start?<Startrecording . ..Turn on the recorder> Just for the record, is it ok for us to audio record your interview?Phase 1: Becoming a Curator on Commons Q1: Tell me, how long have you been editing Wikimedia commons?Q2: How has your work in Wikimedia Commons changed over time?Follow up: What did you contribute to Commons when you started?Why did you choose to contribute to Wikimedia Commons?What types of work do you do now?How would you describe the difference between what you worked on when you started and what you are working on right now?Why did things change?Q3: What contribution have you made to Wikimedia Commons that makes you most proud or happy?Follow up: Could you show us your favorite contribution to Commons?About when did you make this contribution?Could you show us something that you are working on now -or something that you worked on recently?Q4: How do you collaborate with other Commons editors?Follow up: Do you communicate or interact with others?How do you interact?How do these interactions help you decide what work to do in Commons?Phase 2: Tasks and Activities As part of our effort to find people to interview we reviewed lots of contributions to Wikimedia Commons.I would like to show you some of the contributions you made and ask you some questions about them.I'm going to paste a URL into the chat that will link to the first example.I'm also going to share my screen so that you can see what I see.What is the story behind this contribution?Q6: Why did you choose to contribute this?Why is this important to have in Commons?This is very interesting . . .<a little transition to get to Q7> Q7: If you were to characterize the majority of your work in Commons, what would it be?Follow up: that you can see what I see.
<For each example, ask:> Q3: What is the story behind this illustration?Q4: How did you find this image?