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@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of FT2
Sent: Tuesday, 24 July 2012 4:12 AM
To: jschneider@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@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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