[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia, Emergence, and The Wisdom of Crowds

[Alex Krupp]

I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by 
James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively 
ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. 
I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way and 
Wikipedia is a success, but until reading this book it was a total 
mystery why Wikipedia worked the way it did. And judging by the press 
we've gotten, I'm not the only one who feels with way. If you'll 
remember, the mystery of how Wikipedia works has been compared to 
sausage, bumble bees, public bathrooms, etc.

Although the coolest part of the book is probably the studies and 
anecdotal evidence for the above, the big takeaway is that Surowiecki 
explains how to get the most 'emergence' out of a given system. That is, 
a given group can either make worse decisions than the dumbest member or 
make better decisions than the smartest member could, and he gives tips 
for achieving the latter. Some of these can potentially be applied to 
this project.

So after finishing this book I have been thinking a lot about emergence 
in general. Wikipedia displays emergent properties because each article 
is better than the contribution of each individual. Similarly, ants 
display emergence because an ant colony can accomplish things that each 
individual ant cannot even conceive. One commonality between virtually 
all forms of emergence, whether artificial or natural, is that they have 
evolved to provide answers and solutions. An interesting experiment 
would be to see whether questions can also be emergent. The idea being 
that some people are good at coming up with questions, and others are 
good at coming up with answers, but currently you need both skills in 
order to do research; this leaves out all of the people who can ask 
questions they can't find the answers to, and those who could find the 
answers if only they knew the questions.

So my thought experiment is, if a wiki project were created with just 
questions that can be answered non-trivially by science but which 
haven't bet answered yet, could it improve the efficiency at which 
science was carried out? Furthermore, could questions be emergent, in 
that if a bunch of questions are combined then can we think of new 
questions that no single person could think of on their own? I think it 
is easy to see how society benefits when every person has access to the 
sum of all human knowledge, but is there also a benefit to each person 
having access to the sum of all human ignorance?

Alex "pHatidic" Krupp
http://www.alexkrupp.com