Very interesting discussion this, digging into precisely the things I was
trying to get at in the time I could title myself a Wikipedia researcher.
If I can focus enough, and feel I actually have something to add, I might
try to contribute intelligently myself. For now: reading with GREAT
interest.
Best,
Martin
2012/7/24 Kerry Raymond <k.raymond(a)qut.edu.au>
My original point about walking together alone vs in
a crowd was to
illustrate that the same data (the relative movements of the two people)
can have two different interpretations depending on context. I was trying
to illustrate the danger of quantitative analysis without validation from
qualitative sources.****
** **
I was not presenting it as an example of collaboration or anything else.
However, since the topic has arisen, ...****
** **
I think there needs to be a shared goal for collaboration. Thus most WP
editors are “collaborating” because they have the shared goal of building a
bigger and better encyclopaedia (there are editors with other motivations –
such as vandals, self-promoters, etc) . I would agree that a crowd of
people working down the street together is not a collaboration, and that
cooperation or coordination is a better term for it. However, the
distinction is not clear cut. Generally in life, our goals get broken into
sub-goals. So, your goal is to provide well for your family, so you decide
you need a better paying job (sub-goal), so you enrol in a Masters degree
to upgrade your qualifications to get the better job (sub-sub-goal), etc.
So back to walking down the street in a crowd. We presume that the goal of
the people are mostly different, some are heading to the shops, others to
the train station, others to the office, etc. But this goal has a sub-goal
of getting safely to the end of the street, which requires us not to trip
over one another. Are we collaborating with respect to the goal of getting
safely to the end of the street, but cooperating/coordinating with respect
of the different goals of going to the shops or the office? There are
infinite shades of grey in this regard; it depends on where you choose to
put the goal-posts (pun intended).****
** **
This is where stigmergy (the notion of collaboration without explicit
communication but with the ability to sense the environment) which makes a
lot of sense when discussing insects doesn’t translate well to people. This
is because insects can’t talk and we presume that the pheromone trails etc
they leave on the environment are involuntary side-effects of their actions
(e.g finding food), which are then observed from the environment by other
insects. A human analogy would be leaving our footprints when we walk along
the sand or leaving fingerprints at a crime scene. Wikipedia is often
described as stigmergic collaboration because many editors are at work
without a lot of explicit communication (talk pages, email, IRC) to
coordinate their activities. So what is the environment through which WP
stigmergy informs editors in the absence of explicit communication? The
general presumption is that it is the articles themselves, but I think most
of us would struggle with the notion that article edits are involuntary
side-effects; they seem quite deliberate actions by editors (apart perhaps
for the typos!) with the intention of communicating some information to the
WP readership. Or to put it the other way, everything about WP is
deliberate communication, so the insect analogy breaks down. So, any model
of stigmergic collaboration in humans has to draw a line between what will
be regarded an explicit communication and what is sensing the environment
(observing the footprints in the sand). It’s just that the line is hard to
draw as humans are highly communicative creatures and everything about the
WWW is communicative. Nonetheless we might argue that recommender systems
“people who bought this also bought that” on Amazon creates new knowledge
from observing an environment of purchases and are hence stigmergic.
Similar arguments apply to “price guides” based on ebay sales data etc. In
which case we would say that a WP article is stigmergic as it creates new
body of knowledge from the largely independent contributions of many
editors and I think many editors do not read talk pages or edit histories
but simply look at the article and see something missing or wrong and
decide to fix that.****
** **
So I guess I am moving to the conclusion that while some of the most
active & dedicated WP editors are engaged in explicit communication in
order to coordinate various activities (not stigmergic), the long tail of
editors is behaving stigmergically. ****
** **
Kerry****
** **
*From:* wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *FT2
*Sent:* Tuesday, 24 July 2012 4:12 AM
*To:* jschneider(a)pobox.com; Research into Wikimedia content and
communities
*Subject:* Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora
shooting****
** **
Walking down the street suggests different objectives and a sole criterion
of "other people not impacting my agenda". ****
****
What about when the common activity is a genuinely common agenda on the
same object or structure, such as painting a room, and participants'
actions include seeing who's doing what, adjusting your contribution or
current activity to try and make it easy for them, when you see them doing
things and pass them tools or deal with the matters it's clear they see as
problems, in order that their area of focus is progressed and faciliated,
and when you can see the pattern they are painting in one area and you stop
yours to help theirs, identify what they're aiming for by their painting to
date, and you pick up another pot of paint to give them a hand in the
places it's clear their intention is to complete, and when you deliberately
take time to build on or enhance their initial outline by painting extra
decorations within it, and watching to see if they like it or not? ****
****
Then, I think, it can't be compared to the narrow activity of "ensure
others don't intrude on my intentions and otherwise complete indifference"
as occurs when people walk down the street.****
****
****
FT2****
On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Jodi Schneider <jschneider(a)pobox.com>
wrote:****
This suggests distinguishing "coordination" and "collaboration". I
don't
know of firm definitions of these.****
****
Walking down the street avoiding bumping into others -- that is definitely
"coordination". Whether it's "collaboration" is (to me) less
clear.****
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