User:Teratornis/Theory of Wikipedia

This user subpage contains notes about books, lectures, videos, etc. from people who study how mass collaboration in general and Wikipedia in particular work.

The nature of my interest

06:57, 11 August 2008 (UTC): I'm interested in Wikipedia because I spend a fair amount of time editing on it. I'm also interested in bicycling and Peak oil. Therefore, I'm interested in the potential of systems like Wikipedia to replace large amounts of physical travel. Wikipedians are able to organize a project of stupendous complexity without any of the trappings of traditional organizations (commutes to physical offices, business meetings, dress codes, etc.). If we can build Wikipedia this way, what can't we build this way? It seems that most traditional organized human activity involves a large component of information-oriented work susceptible to abstraction via the wiki model. This could greatly increase the scope for telecommuting, reduce petroleum consumption and traffic congestion, etc.

I have yet to see a prominent commentator who discusses the potential for Web 2.0 mass collaboration to reduce travel and hence petroleum consumption. Most people who write about peak oil don't seem to understand anything about information technology (although they all use it), and most people who understand information technology seem unaware of peak oil.

Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky has some interesting insights into organization and cooperative behavior among humans. He wrote Here Comes Everybody and A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

Clay Shirky on New Book "Here Comes Everybody" on YouTube
Clay Shirky - Where do people find the time Part 1 on YouTube
Clay Shirky - Where do people find the time Part 2 on YouTube
Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration on YouTube at TED 2005
Shirky, Clay (2008-04-26). "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus". Retrieved 2008-11-13.

Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler wrote The Wealth of Networks. He talks about the emergence of social production.

Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold wrote the book Smart Mobs.

Way-new collaboration on YouTube (February, 2005)

This is an interesting video about cooperation. Howard Rheingold mentions the Tragedy of the Commons (he's the only TED talker I've seem who mentions it, so far) and the Prisoner's dilemma. He talks about how new forms of communication from prehistoric to modern times have led to new social arrangements. He mentions a bit of sociobiology, how people appear motivated to punish cheaters even at cost to themselves, and how brain scans show the brain's reward center activates when someone punishes a cheater. He mentions Wikipedia as a novel example of cooperative success. He also mentions the open source movement.

Signpost

The Wikipedia Signpost has some articles that summarize research papers about Wikipedia. For example:

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-08-11/Growth study

The Black Swan

The black swan theory by Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. I think Wikipedia is a great example of this. Marshall Poe seems to agree:

Wikipedia has the potential to be the greatest effort in collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever known, and it may well be the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration of any kind. The English-language version alone has more than a million entries (now it's 6,908,532 articles). It is consistently ranked among the most visited Web sites in the world. A quarter century ago it was inconceivable that a legion of unpaid, unorganized amateurs scattered about the globe could create anything of value, let alone what may one day be the most comprehensive repository of knowledge in human history. Back then we knew that people do not work for free; or if they do work for free, they do a poor job; and if they work for free in large numbers, the result is a muddle. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger knew all this when they began an online encyclopedia in 1999. Now, just seven years later, everyone knows different.
— Poe, Marshall (September 2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved 2008-08-25.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)