On Monday 02 May 2005 08:54, Jimmy Wales wrote: It's important to understand *why* he argues there is wisdom in crowds. I don't know if you've read it and disagree with the fundamentals, but it requires three specific conditions: diversity, independence, and decentralization within the group. This seems very appropriate to WP. Excerpts from my mindmap [1] on this particular note are below: [[[ The wisdom of crowds * p=Doubleday y=2004 a=USA r=20040921 An argument that groups of people can make very good decisions when there is diversity, independence, and decentralization within the group. This is augmented by case studies in traffic, science, committees, companies, markets and democracy. The wisdom of crowds + 4 In Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the audience got it right 91 percent of the time, the friend/expert at right 65 percent 10 the stock market identified Morton Thiokol because: the diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation 22 bookies, Google, IEM (election's), HSX (box-office), are all successful decision markets Diversity + 30 smaller groups need to actively pursue diversity 31 March: stale groups (without an influx of new naive members) spend too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring 34 experts aren't just wrong; they don't know how wrong they are 36 Irving Janis identified "Group think" in small homogeneous communities 38 Solomon Asch found that people often go with the wrong answer in a group -- but at least one confederate of a dissentor increases their autonomy Independence + 41 Independence isolates errors and garners more information 43 Milgram et al put increasingly large groups of men on the street corner looking up, others did the same, but not because of conformity, but of "social proof" 49 herding: no one ever got fired for buying IBM 53 information cascade: following a leader and with imperfect information, people stop looking to their own local knowledge 64 Hung and Blott performed an experiment with 2 urns, one with 50% more white or black marbles respectively. When an individual correct choice was awarded, people incorrectly cascaded; yet, when collectively rewarded, it was best to reveal one's own marble color Decentralization + 78 the problem with U.S. intelligence was not decentralization, but a bad form which didn't permit good filtration and aggregation 87 Brian Arthur "El Farol" problem: should one go to a bar that might be too crowded or empty? No easy solution , but it demonstrates that we used inductive processes in considering problems. [1] http://reagle.org/joseph/2003/freemindbrowser.html

On Monday 02 May 2005 10:11, Stirling Newberry 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. If the asynchronous and bite-sized character of Open contributions contribute to their success (Benkler "fine-grained", Sproull "microcontributions"), is that all? What *kind* of micro-contributions are necessary? *If* the contributions are crap, if they they aren't coming from diverse participants (e.g., not "group think"), independent (e.g., not "herding"), and decentralized and filtered/aggregated well (e.g., not "US intelligence" ;) ) then they might be useful.

On 5/3/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: 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+

On Tuesday 03 May 2005 18:19, Sj wrote: First, I whole heartedly agree with Jimbo that any posited explanation that fails to account for the dynamics and culture of good-willed interaction has got it wrong. So in that sense, Surowieki is (perhaps) necessary but (certainly) not sufficient. Second, I'm not familiar with "swarm intelligence", but it is reminiscent of "smart mobs" and while Rheinghold (2003) doesn't have a very strong theory on that point (more of a provocative metaphor), he does make heavy use of the phenomena Sj is speaking of: a pareto principle (80/20) or power law curve of participation. Power-law curves are all over the real world and net, and specifically, with respect to participation -- rather than links, say, in the Blogosphere -- Adar and Huberman (2000) found 50% of the content on Gnutella is provided by 1% of the users, O'Mahony and Ferraro (2003) found the curve in the Debian dev key ring, Moon and Sproul (2002) on the Linux Kernel list, Briggs et al. (1997) in group support systems, Krogh, Spaeth and Lakhani (2003) in Freenet. (The latter paper, "Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study" is really very good, as should be Lakhani's forthcoming thesis on the "Primacy of the Periphery." The trick is not to assume that just because a minority does the largest portion of the work, everyone else is unimportant. I like to compare them to the submerged portion of the ice-berg. Periphery members can become core members, they also can impart a momentum.)

A key number to make available is not just the number of edits, but the size of the deltas. This would filter different editing styles - some people are multiple edits in a session, others are one edit and then perhaps a proof. This will also give an indication of who does the bulk of the writing and who does the bulk of the editting and who does the bulk of the proofing - which are separate catagories of contribution. All of which are important - turning raw material into a formatted article is a crucial part of the process - but they are different activities.

Delirium wrote: Users who aren't logged in make only around 18% of all edits. It doesn't change the results materially. --Jimbo

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 05:52:42PM -0400, Delirium wrote: Why not? Bots are part of what humans do. I agree that they need to be counted separately for many metrics when making statistical analyses of the social interactions on Wikipedia, but they are a social phenomena in that they are created, targeted, and enacted by humans as a result of their desires and needs within the larger social circumstances of the Wikipedia project as a whole. -- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

Jimmy Wales wrote: This indicates a concentration at the top, but is this concentration bigger or smaller than any alternative situation? Book (and record) stores have always sold a bulk of "best sellers", with a "tail" of less common titles. In recent decades, supermarkets are selling books with a higher concentration of best sellers (a shorter tail), while Internet book sellers such as Amazon.com offer a far longer tail than any traditional book store can afford. This was featured in the October 2004 issue of Wired, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html and is the topic of the www.thelongtail.com blog. I think that Wikipedia also has a very long tail, a large number of contributors who just write a few articles on highly specialized topics. Much more so than any mainstream (printed) encyclopedia. But we don't have their statistics to compare with. If we just compare the bulk or mainstream part of Wikipedia, I think it is still smaller than Britannica, even though Wikipedia's long tail makes its total number of articles very large. I think it would be interesting if we could measure how far into the tail each article is. Is this the number of page views? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

On 5/4/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Well it's also the case that there are a great number of trivial edits (minor copyediting, vandalism reversion, simple wikification0 that get made by people with the right 'calling' (and in some cases, the right automation tools)... The nature of these changes (each small and not time consuming, but as a whole tedious and unrewarding to many people) causes a small number of obsessive (in a good way) people to make a great number of edits. I suspect that if you omit these edits you'd find the distribution of contributions to be somewhat less concentrated.

On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 11:20:58PM -0400, Sj wrote: So now individualistic behavior is evidence of communal "swarm" behavior? When defined thusly, it's no wonder you see "swarm" behavior everywhere: apparently, anything that involves the action of large numbers of individuals constitutes a "swarm" if it isn't specifically inwardly contentious. I don't think such a broad definition of "swarm" behavior is particularly valuable, however, so I don't use it. -- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

Sj wrote: I think this is an interesting aspect, and definitely something I notice in my monitoring of "New Pages". Often there will be a new and fairly low-quality article created by an anon user on a topic I had never heard of. Sometimes I'll do some research on the topic, find out it's really somewhat interesting, and basically scrap the original crappy contribution and completely rewrite the article from scratch into at least a reasonably good stub. So in a sense, I've written 100% of the article as it then exists, but without the original drive-by user, I wouldn't have done so. Meaning that even users who are not much help in actually writing encyclopedia articles are at least occasionally useful in pointing out things that should be written about. -Mark

I would argue that every single article is a weighted vote between various ideas. Every single edit has to stand up the scrutiny of every single person (collectively, a crowd) who reads the article for the rest of time Isn't a crowd just a group of people? A wise crowd is a group of individuals who make a better decision than the smartest individual could have made on their own. A dumb crowd is one that compromises to the lowest common denominator. Thinking about it, the title of the book is actually misleading because according to the author the way to get a group of individuals to make wise decisions is to prevent them from being anthropomorphized into a crowd and adopting groupthink. So the "wisdom of the crowd" is really just the "wisdom of different people", as you say. That is why WP has the success it does, because it is just "wisdom of different people." Alex Krupp http://www.alexkrupp.com

Jimmy Wales wrote: This might be the case in some portions, and on smaller Wikis, but in general I don't think it is. When I edit articles, 90%+ of the time the other editors are people I have never conversed with, and often people I have never seen edit other articles before. We work together in ad-hoc fashion on a single article for maybe 10 minutes, and then never see each other again. When I write an article, it's usually improved in a similar way by people I have never seen, and often never see again after they've made their contributions, often on the order of a single sentence. That seems a lot more like the "wisdom of crowds" thing... a few people stopping by and adding a sentence, fixing a punctuation mark, etc., and then disappearing. Well, not literally disappearing, but there are enough people editing the en: Wikipedia that it might as well be the same. In a few areas where there are prolific editors, you run into the same people over and over (a few of the history areas are like this, as is math), but the vast majority of articles don't have any recognizable editors. -Mark

On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 04:29:07PM +0200, Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote: That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so. -- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote: A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed. Ec

On May 7, 2005, at 7:43 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote: It isn't a principle of law, the correct principle is "that which is not forbidden is allowed". The specifically changes the meaning entirely.

Chad Perrin wrote: I have no problem with that change. Ec

On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 02:30:40PM -0400, Stirling Newberry wrote: Perhaps you're not familiar with the intricacies of the English language. -- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

Stirling Newberry wrote: [snip quoted argument] Having encountered Mr. Newberry on several other forums, I would urge that people not waste their time arguing with him. He generally resorts to attacks on his opponents rather than attempts to make coherent points [1]. The unexplained use here of several legal Latin phrases in passing is characteristic of his typical "vocabulary-dropping, but doesn't know what he's talking about" style. (And yes, this counts as an ad hominem attack as well, but sometimes one must point out the obvious.) -Mark [1] See, for example, this representative exchange with kuro5hin.org founder Rusty Foster: http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2004/10/15/212724/90/4#4

Stirling Newberry wrote: Since I have not been participating in this thread, I'm not sure to what you mean to refer. Your previous argument in this thread was with Ray Saintonge, not with me. -Mark

Stirling Newberry wrote: While an interesting comment, I fail to see how you can sensibly have said "my point was", when in fact you were not engaged in a discussion with me. How could you have been making a point about my understanding of language in a discussion I was not party to? -Mark

Delirium wrote: Fantastic! ... and I thought I was arguing with Jean-Baptiste Soufron. I suppose if I worked hard at it I could make a distinction between "explicitly" and "specifically", but the former may indeed be a superior choice. The question that set us off in this direction was whether someone had the right to put his work into the public domain. I maintain that he does. To put this in terms of the distinction between "malum prohibitum" and "malum in se" is absurd in the absence of a "malum" of any kind in such an act. Is Stirling proposing that someone should be fined for putting his writings in the public domain? Ec

Alphax wrote: That's a bloody arrogant attitude. Quoting yourself as an authority is a nice trick if you can get away with it. Your statement that it is impossible to grant one's works into the public domain is patently false. Copyright is an intellectual property right, and it is fundamental to property rights that the owner have the right to dispose of his property in whatever manner he sees fit. I looked at the page which you mentioned and the only thing that purports to be from the copyright office is a single unverifiable sentence from a letter received by User:Dcoetzee. It is completely out of contest. For that sentence to be credible one would need to see the entire letter, as well as the letter from the user showing the questions that he asked. While it's true that a work receives a copyright by default as a requirement of the Berne Convention, the absence of "special means is not a barrier to putting a work into the public domain. Moral rights are another matter, and I realize that they are not a part of the US law on this. For the moment let's stick to US law. Once the situation there is clear it will be easier to consider the matter in the light of the law in other countries. Please do one of two things: 1. Cite the section of US statute law which explicitly denies the right to abandon all one's rights in a work, or 2. Cite a judicial decision which has clearly denied a person's right to abandon his copyright. In the absence of this I would conclude that you don't know what you're talking about. These are alternative ways of doing things. :-D Ec

On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 03:27:56AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote: Copyright isn't a property right. The term "intellectual property" is a form of colloquial shorthand rather than a legal term indicating actual status as a form of "property". I don't know whether this affects one's ability (or inability) to pass something willfully into the public domain, but it does affect the relevance of your statement to the discussion at hand. -- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

Gerard Meijssen wrote: Without fundamental principles the law is meaningless. Reading the law in a way that doing something should be allowed is perfectly fine; it is neither weasely nor against what the law is about. Bending rules is a part of the normal legal game. Big companies like Microsoft will do whatever they can to have the law work the way they want it to work. If it's right for them it's right for the little guy, and until the little guy learns that he will forever be a loser. The principle as I expressed it does not prevent people from doing anything. If something is not mentioned in the law then doing it is not a violation of the law. The converse principle, that what is not specifically allowed is forbidden, would lead to the absurdity that any kind of innovation is illegal. The fewer rules the better. To me an image or vision of what the project is about determines what rules are necessary. Who does the deeming? If the rules are contrary to the spirit of the project I would change the rules. There's nothing wrong with this, but then it has nothing to do with the topic. Who said that we are? So a balance is required, and this only proves my point. If something is clearly allowed in one country, but requires a slight "bending" of the rules in another country we go ahead and bend those rules. This is not the same as an outright violation of the rules. We do not need to strive for the lowest common legal denominator. If we did that we would be bowing to the whims of a government like the one in China which might shut the project down for anything that it felt was an insult to their government. The separate rules of different projects are not an issue here. Ec

Gerard Meijssen wrote: I have no problem with the concept that there are common ideas that bind the WMF projects. My comments could have as easily been about any project or all of them. Your conclusion was a non sequitur. The thread was about legal issues. Ec

Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote: The statement (which was cut off at some point) was about your guess that French law did not allow a work to be put into the public domain. Citing a specific passage in the French statutes would be much more effective than speculating about the law. Ec

Wow... That is totally... strange. On 10/05/05, Jean-Baptiste Soufron <jbsoufron(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM POSSIT MATERIARI ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE

Clearly, it is not strange, it is the french vision of copyright : author's rights... meant to protect authors from pressure of their editors, etc. It is not specially better or worse :) But it is different and it is important to know it if you want to set up a good policy. Le 10 mai 05, à 21:48, Petr Kadlec a écrit :

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . . Hi, how do the CC people handle this? Till __ . / / / / ... Till Westermayer - till we *) . . . mailto:till@tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072 . Hirschstraße 5. 79100 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179 . . . . .

Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote: Does this mean that a French author can sue us for using work that he voluntarily contributed to Wikipedia? Assuming the author's work has monetary value more than zero, then the zero we are paying him is by necessity more than 7/12 less than what it is really worth. Are we legally different in this case than a commercial publisher who convinces someone to sign away his rights for much less than they're worth? Very odd... -Mark

Well, at least he could try to sue. I am not sure he would get remedies for a non-commercial use, but he could certainly obtain to forbid you to us his work any longer.

Fred Bauder wrote: Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. The right of withdrawal (CPI L121-4) can only be exerced if the author indemnifies the publisher for the losses incurred by this withdrawal, as very clearly stated in the law. My understanding is that Irismeister would have to refund us the developer or employee time needed to sort out his contributions... Furthermore, Wikipedia is clearly a "collaborative work" (CPI L113-2). In that circumstance, the rights may only be exerced by common agreement of the authors, and if there is disagreement, a court would have to step in. To me his means Irismeister would have to get a court to decide that he can exerce his right of withdrawal from this common work. Thus my analysis is that: - it would cost him an arm and a leg - the court could very likely just rule that he cannot ask for withdrawal from this collaborative work. -- DM

Good point. Looks like I was a bit overambitious in my initial email. The book does not claim that the input of experts is invalid, nor am I claiming the advice of experts is invalid. The book argues that under the right circumstances groups of both experts and non-experts can make better decisions than just experts. Whether this is true or not I don't know, but I'm not claiming that it is gospel truth, only that I think Wikipedians would enjoy the book. I did make the claim that people reading this would agree with the claim, but apparently I was wrong on that one. I also disagree that the input of experts is what makes Wikipedia work. I would make an educated guess that the majority of edits that the top contributors make make are in topics they know nothing about: fixing grammar, improving the flow, wikifying, placing articles in categories, removing POV, reverting vandalism, etc. But is it true that the facts of the article were originally added by domain experts? Not necessarily, a lot of my favorite articles were written largely a sentence at a time, where each person knew one fact or only a handful of facts about the subject. Each of these contributors was most likely ignorant about the topic as a whole, yet because each added a fact or two relatively good articles have eventually been created. A good example of this is [[Tea]] on en. I don't disagree with this... I agree that there is no emergence at the project level; we are all trying to create an encyclopedia that is composed of a collection of articles. But at the same time, Wikipedia isn't supposed to be the sum of all human data, but rather the sum of all human knowledge. At the article level it is possible for many people to each add a single fact, that when combined allow conclusions to be drawn by readers that were not known by any individual contributor. I would consider this to be emergence, though if others want to say that this is only a collaboration and is not emergent then I won't argue because I don't think it particularly matters. I don't know enough about what qualifies and what does not qualify as distributed intelligence (outside of the mostly black and white definitions used by computer science) to pass judgement on this, but I'll take your word for it. In another reply, Stirling Newberry says, "I've read it, it is the "Dow 36,000" for the 90s." I had never heard of this book so I looked it up in Amazon, and the first review says that the main problem with the book is that it is written by people who think they are smarter than the market. This is interesting, considering the Wisdom of Crowds is about how individuals aren't consistently smarter than the market and about how to use the intelligence of markets to make good decisions. As a practical example of how Surowiecki's ideas could be applied by individuals in WP, consider the process for voting on which articles should become featured. The task at hand is to separate the excellent articles from the merely good. According to Surowiecki, when one has to make a decision through a group then the best decisions are made by groups which have diversity, independence, and decentralization (to borrow from Joseph's mindmap). This means that, according to Surowiecki, the quality of judging of articles will increase the more diverse the group is in terms of what they know, their values and beliefs, levels of intelligence, etc. The takeaway would be that we should get as many people to participate in choosing articles to go into WP 1.0 in order to make the best decisions about what stays and goes. Secondly, each individual should act independently. That means that s/he should read the article and write down their reaction to it BEFORE reading other people's comments. If their comment is completely redundant then they should possibly delete it, but individuals should not read other people's comments before reading the article. Thirdly, the process should be decentralized. WP does an excellent job of this already: there is no one telling people what to do, and everyone just works on what they are interested in when they feel like it. Going back to our example about choosing FA/WP 1.0 articles, our decentralization is an asset because if there were someone giving orders for people to vote on a certain number of articles per week or else have their account banned, one could easily imagine a situation of people voting and commenting without really reading the articles first. Anyway, I didn't mean for my post to be offensive by putting words in the mouths of othhers, nor did I mean to imply that I believe all of what Surowiecki says is gospel truth. However, I did enjoy the book, I do think that it relates to Wikipedia (even though Jimbo disagrees), and it got me thinking more about the social dynamics of this project. On that basis I still recommend the book. Alex "pHatidic" Krupp http://www.alexkrupp.com