In other words, the Barnstars seemed to be discouraging rather than encouraging contribution.
Because I have no Barnstars to give, nor am I near any barns from which to steal them…[edit].
Much to their surprise, the people to whom they awarded Barnstars tended to make fewer edits after receiving one.
Or you could imagine a situation where a
research would want to isolate the effect of Barnstars from all these other things.
In particular, they studied the effects of Barnstars, an award that any Wikipedian can give to any other
Wikipedian to acknowledge hard work and due diligence.
Finally, when
the researchers compared people in the treatment group(i.e., received Barnstars) and people in the control group,
they found that the barnstar caused editors to contribute about 60% more.
That is,
Restivo and van de Rijt didn't want to give Barnstars to undeserving editors,
and they didn't want their experiment to disrupt the Wikipedia community(Restivo and Rijt 2012, 2014).