Wikipedia: A case study in global collective intelligence
In order to understand collective intelligence more clearly, we need to study one of the strongest and prime examples of collective knowledge building on the Web.That is Wikipedia.Despite earlier questions regarding it’s usability, and overall accuracy, it is indeed an amazing accomplishment. The knowledge base of Wikipedia is growing exponentially.Itis a rich and exciting case study on anenormous scale.Within it lies a trove of information regarding howcollective intelligence is formed and valued by the community that creates it.
According to Wilkinson & Huberman, (2007):
“The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is an impressive example of a global collective intelligence at work. Since its inception in January 2001, Wikipedia has grown to encompass 6.40 million articles (by April 2007) in 250 languages generated from 236 million edits by 5.77 million contributors.
Both Bernardo A. Huberman, and Dennis Wilkinson are with HP and the reknown PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). They havereported substantial findings regarding Wikipedia in theApril 2007 issue of First Monday.
The content of Wikipedia is deemed useful and relevant by the user community at large is confirmed by its current position as11th most visited site on the Internet, serving an average of 16,536 requests per second.
The authors studied a correlation between the number of edits and article quality within 1,211 featured articles. Theresearchers concluded:
“We have shown that although Wikipedia is a complex system in which of millions of diverse editors collaborate in an unscheduled and virtually uncontrolled fashion, editing follows a very simple overall pattern. This pattern implies that a small number of articles, corresponding to topics of high relevance or visibility, accrete a disproportionately large number of edits. And, while large collaborations have been shown to fail in many contexts, Wikipedia article quality continues to increase, on average, as the number of collaborators and the number of edits increases. Thus, topics of high interest or relevance are naturally brought to the forefront of visibility and quality.”
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References
Wilkinson, D. & Huberman, B.A. (April 2007). Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia. Retrieved January 8, 2007, from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/wilkinson/#w1
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