People increasingly share online information with the communities they belong to. This paper presents an empirical field study of four communities on how they interact with collective content. Our results reveal users' motivations for creating collective content. The results indicate the defining characteristics by which collective content can be described: semantic content of the content item, the level of sharing and the community's contribution. Furthermore, we found that collectivity of content is not primarily an ownership issue but more a matter of users' perceptions of communality of content. Keywords Collective content, user-content interaction, content management, communities, field study ACM Classification Keywords H.3.5 On-line Information Services: Data sharing. H.3.m Information Storage and Retrieval: Miscellaneous. H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation: Miscellaneous.