On 5/3/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Joseph Reagle wrote:
I don't feel as if I need to defend Surowiecki, and I don't understand your point, but I think he's made a useful contribution as your own example demonstrates.
I should point out that I like Surweicki's thesis just fine, it's just that I'm not convinced that "swarm intelligence" is very helpful in understanding how Wikipedia works -- in fact, it might be an impediment, because it leads us away from thinking about how the community interacts in a process of reasoned discourse.
The idea that Wikipedia is basically a core group of dedicated editors collaborating and reasoning together to build an encyclopedia, is very appealing to me. I used to think it was exactly right. And since most feedback I get or give on-wiki (including the bulk of policy and meta-discussions) involve dedicated editors, it is hard to recognize the effect, if any, of "swarm intelligence" on the project's development.
However, thanks to a tool that lets me monitor Recentchanges in the background while doing other work, I have listened to some 100,000 changes over the past few weeks; and paid more attention than usual to new pages and edits by new users or anons. I wonder how other RC-watchers feel about this...
Currently, I imagine Wikipedia as a massive, active swarm intelligence, supplemented by small roving groups of active editors who admire consistency, elegance, and reasoned discourse. (not unlike certain models of how the brain works :)
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 is constantly extending the frontiers of the project, and also making uncoordinated changes to core popular pages; the coordinated groups are more steadily expanding the scope of what they cover, and integrating new content into it. If you look only at popular pages, the coordinated efforts drown out the rest. If you look at leaf pages (2000 new pages each day, half created by anons, 15% more by new users, most of which a week later have only been significantly edited by their creator), the swarm efforts are very noticable.