On 5/3/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)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.
--
+sj+