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.