On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 06:19:59PM -0400, Sj wrote:
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.
[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
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http://ccd.apotheon.org ]