Threats of Using Gamification for Motivating Web Page Quality Evaluation

Nowadays great variety of web services attempts to leverage people's natural desire for competition, in order to promote or discourage certain types of online behaviors. Such game-derived techniques are known as gamification and have already been utilized both by commercial websites and researchers who have designed so called "games with a purpose" in order to collect some data inaccessible for non-human agents. Apart from numerous applications, this approach has also been criticized for creating an artificial sense of achievement and encouraging unintended behaviors. In our paper we investigate, whether simple gamification techniques can improve the quality of feedback, regarding the truthfulness of information available on the Internet. We present the results of an experiment carried out on a group of students who were asked to rate websites and statements using four evaluation methods with different rewarding schemes. Our study shows which of those methods have been the most frequently chosen, and what was their influence on user behavior in terms of level of agreement and bias towards certain evaluation values.