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

[Jimmy Wales]

Sj wrote:
> The swarm does the bulk of the writing, especially finding and
> providing current facts, starting new articles, and adding neglected
> POVs.  The roving groups are sensitive to dozens of policy pages, and
> implement them as they rove... they also take on large projects, one
> at a time, and try to implement certain changes across thousands of
> pages at once.

"The swarm does the bukl of the writing..." hints at a testable hypothesis.

My own research indicates the opposite, but let me be perfectly NPOV
about my own research: it is completely amateurish and driven by my need
to make interesting public talks that get the world excited and thinking
about wikipedia. :-)  I can hardly be considered an unbiased scientific
researcher.

My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged
in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users.  It would be extremely
interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles,
old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily
trafficked articles, etc.

A deeper understanding of all these issues can have some interesting
implications for us in terms of understanding certain policy issues.

--Jimbo