On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 06:19:59PM -0400, Sj wrote:
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.
[snip]
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.
I think that by characterizing it as a "swarm" you're missing the central point -- that even when the "regulars" aren't involved, what's going on is actually carefully composed edits by individuals who, though a chaotic sort of collaboration, are building something as a team. These are not insects contributing intelligence to a central thinking process that produces good works. Rather, individual works are created by individual collaborators, and edited by others, producing a collection of good works. What we have here is more of a (finally sane) peer review system than any swarm intelligence.
It's easy to lose sight of the individual contributions and start to attribute advancements to collective phenomena when all you're using to measure results is statistical data. That's not a truly accurate picture, however, of what's going on.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]