Wikipedia outgrew Microsoft's paid encyclopedia, and Pink says fun beat pay

In the mid-1990s, Microsoft set out to build an encyclopedia. The company put money and management behind it. It paid staff writers and editors to produce thousands of articles, and assigned managers to keep the project within budget and on schedule. It looked like the safe way to build a reliable reference work.

A few years later, a rival encyclopedia started with the opposite offer. Author Dan Pink, who writes about work and motivation, describes the pitch this way: "Do it for fun." "No one gets paid a cent, or a euro or a yen." "Do it because you like to do it." One model promised a paycheck. The other promised only the chance to contribute.

The comparison is the heart of Pink's argument about motivation, not a laboratory result. Wikipedia kept growing while Encarta faded, and Microsoft dropped Encarta in 2009. Pink points to Wikipedia as evidence that enjoyment and a sense of purpose can rival pay and supervision for creative work.

That outcome would have surprised most experts at the time. Speaking in the late 2000s about a choice economists might have faced a decade earlier, Pink says, "10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model."

To Pink, the two encyclopedias tested two systems for getting work done. In one corner were carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments imposed from the outside, what specialists call extrinsic motivators. In the other were, in his terms, autonomy, mastery, and purpose, meaning the chance to choose your own work, to get better at it, and to serve something larger than yourself.

Pink likens the matchup to a famous boxing rivalry, the bouts between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier known as the Thrilla in Manila. His verdict is rhetorical, not a scorecard. Inner drive, he says, wins "in a knockout."

Pink's lesson, as he tells it, is that for creative work, wanting to do the job can beat having to do it.