On Wednesday 05 January 2005 08:53, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
J.F. de Wolff wrote:
Articles develop Darwinistically. They emerge from primordial soup (substubs, anon newbie edits) and evolve as more people add material.
The essence of my talk in Berlin was to argue against this view of how wikipedia operates. Obviously, there is something to it if we streeeeeeetch the "Darwinistic" metaphor to the breaking point. But in the main, I think this analogy is one which misleads us into incorrect conclusions.
As an aside, and being a non-expert, that sounds right to me -- are the slides from your talk available? To actually claim something as Darwinian one should have variation, reproduction, and selection. In the Wikipedia context there is variation and selection but I do not think one sees a continuance of character in the articles themselves. To really think about this in a Darwinian context one would need to ask what is the object of selection and reproduction? It clearly is not the articles themselves, what would more likely be the culture of Wikipedia itself as reproduced in the socialization of newcomers. So the Wikipedia culture of friendliness, populism, persistence, etc. is selected for given the collaborative character of this work, its historical momentum, and reproduced via socialization. A potential perspective on the question of "expertise" is then why experts are not selected in this environment? A simple reason is that they are used to competing and surviving in a different environment with similar goals (knowledge production) but otherwise quite different: simply, they lack patience -- or simply do not have the time -- when the authority granted to them in that other environment does not translate to this one.