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We are seeing the rapid growth of an unusual form of production for information resources on the Internet. The defining characteristic is that much of the information provided by a producer is donated to the producer, by people not employed by the producer. There are several names for this production technology; we favor user-contributed content (typically there is no boundary between contributors and users of the content). 1

Many information producers now significantly (though rarely exclusively) rely on a user-contributed production model. Many are successful and quite socially valuable. We survey several different categories of such information services in this chapter. Well-known examples include Wikipedia articles; Amazon product reviews; Flickr photos; Digg news stories; del. icio. us Web bookmarks; CiteULike scholarly citations; open-source software projects such as Linux and the Apache web server; Peer2Patent comments on patent applications; the Stanford Encyclopedia of