[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia, Emergence, and The Wisdom of Crowds

[Joseph Reagle]

On Tuesday 03 May 2005 18:19, Sj wrote:
> > 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.
>
> 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.

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.)