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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

Recently I have been researching my own collective intelligencesuite of applications.I have been systematically trying and experimenting numerous solutions. Here I will share with you some of my preliminary conclusions for corporate knowledge sharing applications:

WikiMedia
This is open source software, and is the same thing Wikipedia is built on.Anyone can implement it on an server, their own desktop, or even on a portable memory stick. As reported previously it is being used by manyFortune 500companies. Best of all, it’s free. However it does have some serious drawbacks which must be revealed.

WikiMedia Usability Problems
The look and feel of a WikiMedia product, is familiar to anyone who has used Wikipedia.The familiar interfacemakes for a happy beginning.But when one is face with the daunting task of posting, the comfort level quickly changes. For example,how do you post a page? This simple function is not made clear, and can be confounding to new users. The only way to post a page is to:

1.Search on a topic.
2.Discover the page doesn’t exist
3. Click on a linkonthe “not found” page.
4. Then begin writing.

WikiMedia Formatting Difficulties
Formatting anything other than straight text is difficult.WikiMedia doesn’t use pure HTML formatting, nor does it have a WYSIWYG editor.Individuals used to working within thesimplisticlyrefinedworld of blogs, may find thefunctionality, or lack thereof frustrating. Here is just a small taste of Wikipedia’s help section onformatting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page

From a user’s viewpoint, (which really is the only thing that matters) this is not very good. WikiMedia’s help section is extremely difficult to follow, and too verbose. The first page is filled with promise.However upon digging deeper the writing is confused, and unfocused.

In evaluating collective intelligence systems, remember, the cornerstones of usability according to Nielsen(2003) are systems that are:

a. intuitive
b. easy to learn and remember
c. satisfying
d. efficient to work with
e. low error rate, and easy to recover if you do make a mistake.

I would like torecommend that the WikiMedia edit functions be made more user friendly and not written in such a way to turn off potential valuable contributors.

References:

Nielsen, J. (2003). Usability 101: definition and fundamentals. RetrievedJanuary 6, 2008, from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

Wikipedia.org (2007) Help. Retrieved January 6, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents

Thomas Malone (2006) has defined collective intelligence as:
“Groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent”As reported in earlier postings, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is working deligently to answer the following:

“How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any individual, group, or computer has ever done before? “

Malone (2006) suggests that there are at least three types of research that need to be performed in order to answer the question.

1. Collecting interesting examples, and “systematically describing interesting cases of collective intelligence.”

2. Create new examples of collective intelligence environments.

3. Systematic studies and experiments.

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References
Malone, T. (2006). What is collective intelligence and what will we do about it? Retrieved January 6, 2008, from http://cci.mit.edu/about/MaloneLaunchRemarks.html

MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence hopes to answer the question: “How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?”

Klein (2007) addressed the inherent problems of large-scale projects involving collective intelligence, inhis paper “Achieving collective intelligence via large-scale on-line argumentation“. He notedthat there are limits within current technologies for “large-scale deliberation.” He stated that while email, instant messaging, open forums, wikis and blogs do allow for individuals to interact globally there are “serious shortcomings from the standpoint of enhancing collective intelligence.”

The content captured by such tools is notorious for often being unsystematic, highly repetitive, and of highly variable quality. At its best (as with Wikipedia) a carefully nutured community process can be effective at capturing short descriptive articles about non-controversial topics, but all those approaches tend to break down when faced with the need to come up with coherent responses to complex problem that involve many competing perspectives. In such cases, discussions can be hijacked by a narrow set of “hot” issues, small voices can be lost, and achieving or identifying consensus becomes almost impossible.”

Klein (2007) stated that tools such as argumentation or rationale capture are a way to help enable brainstorming on controversial topics. They can help organize interaction by having users “structure their interactions into a network consisting of three kinds of entitites:

1. Issues (questions to be answered)
2. Options (alternative answers for a question)
3. Arguments (Claims that support or detract from some other statement.)

Challenges in Creating Large Scale Collective Intelligence
In search of creating large scale collective intelligence banks to solve critical pressing problems such as global warming, reacting to medical epidemics, etc, Klien (2007) has identified numerous design issues.

1. How do we avoid needless duplication?
Explanation: When there are many contributors working concurrently, and the sheer volume of entries grows, it is no longer possible to capture an argument structure within a single screen. It therefore is increasingly likely that someone will introduce an issue, option, or argument aht has already been posted by someone else.

2. How do participants converge on the key issues?
Explanation: Converging on key issues is unlikely to occur prior to posting into the system, as it might in a small-scale setting, especially a facilitated one. This suggests that tools and/or procedures should be made available to enable deliberations about the structure of the argumentation, and not just the content.3. Sheer volume of posters and entries increases exponentially in larger systems.

3. How do we ensure wide participation in entering/editing content?
Explanation: People are reluctant to replace, or modify work by someone else, even if the posting has serious failings. Reluctant to offer diverging opinions if the bulk of the existing arguments all seem to point in another direction.

4. How do we ensure that the argument is structured correctly?
Explanation: In an open system, we can expect that many of the participants will not be experts in how to structure argument maps effectively. This suggests that a large-scale argumentation system needs to support a continuum of formalization, allowing people to enter content in the form that they are comfortable with, be it extended prose or fully-structured argument maps.

5. How do we ensure succinct argumentation about options?
Explanation: We need some tools and/or procedures to summarize and even replace discussion threads with more succinct forms.

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Additional Resources:
Wearesmarterthanme.org: Creating a book of business best practices written collaboratively.

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References
Klein, M. (2007). Achieving collective intelligence via large-scale onl-line argumentation: MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.Retrieved January 1, 2008, from http://cci.mit.edu/publications/CCIwp2007-01.pdf

Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligencecan be defined as an organically grown bank of knowlege, which providesthe group with a totalsum of knowledge that is fargreater than what each individual member could produce or realize on their own. Information within collective intelligenceis organizednaturally according to each member’s interest and intention. Members of the group become smarter by collaboratively definingand organizing information to aid in each other’sunderstanding.Collective intelligence isone of thecornerstone concepts of Web 2.0 technologies.

PARC research is nowresearching and developing concepts related toaugmented social cognition. They define augmented social cognition as being:

Supported by systems, the enhancement of the ability of a group to remember, think, and reason; the system-supported construction of knowledge structures by a group. (Chi, 2007)

When PARC becomes focused on a particular dimension of research it behooves us to take notice. PARC has continually produced revolutionary technologies over the years that have completely changed the way we live and work. They created the ability for us tonetwork computers using the Ethernet, created graphical user interfaces (GUI), object oriented programming, and laser printing to name just a few of their breakthroughs. (PARC, 2007) PARC at this time has over “170 researchers from the physical, computer, biological, and social sciences (80% of whom hold doctoral degrees). “Employees come from 46 different countries, and include native speakers of virtually every major language. This diversity contributes to an environment in which collaboration is multi-dimensional, cutting across cultures, laboratories, and scientific disciplines.

Here is Ed Chi’s presentation on augmented social cognition within Google Talk. The video is entitled: “Social information foraging and collaboratve search: Augmented social cognition from social foraging to social sensemaking.” (Chi, 2007)

Additional Resources:
Social information foraging and collaborative search: PDF

Rememberance of things: Information foraging

References

Chi, Ed. (2007). Augmented social cognition. Retrieved December 31, 2007, from http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2007/05/augmented-social-cognition.html

Chi, Ed. (2007). Social information foraging and collaborative search: Augmented social cognition from social foraging to social sensemaking. Retrieved December 31, 2007, from http://www.parc.com/research/projects/collaborativesystems/default.html

PARC Research. (2007). Retrieved December 31, 2007, from http://www.parc.com/research/projects/collaborativesystems/default.html

Wiki Etiquette: byRachael King, Business Week (2007)

DO
1. Be bold: Go ahead and create content or edit someone else’s work. Wikis develop faster when people fix problems, correct grammar, add facts, etc. This is a collaborative tool, after all.

2. Make notes: If you make changes, explain why you made those changes in the discussion or notes pages that are generally attached to wikis.

3. Give praise: Has someone added useful content to the page or spent a great deal of time cleaning up the page so it’s easier to read? Praise helps let people know their contributions are valued €”and makes them want to contribute again.

4. Build structure: Wikis need people to synthesize and structure content so it’s easy to read. Even if you’re not creating content, you can still help by shaping what’s already there.

5. Be polite: As with e-mail and instant messaging, it’s often easy to misinterpret the tone of a comment. Disagreements over content or edits can become heated. If that’s the case, it’s a good idea to take a break for a day or two and come back to it later.

DON’T
1. Take it personally: Yes, colleagues will edit your work and you might not agree with every change, but that’s the nature of collaboration. It doesn’t mean that your co-workers dislike you or think you’re stupid.

2. Ignore questions: Colleagues may disagree with your changes and ask why you made them. If so, be prepared to give concrete reasons for your edits.

3. Delete useful content: Many times a posting can be improved by amending or editing it, but deleting content upsets people, and they may feel they’ve wasted their time.

4. Be chatty: A wiki shouldn’t be used as a chat room. Any discussions related to a wiki subject should take place on the discussion or talk page, not on the actual content page.

5. Keep it secret: If you find valuable content on your company’s wiki, tell others about it. Wikis benefit from a wide range of contributors.

References:
King, R. (2007). Wiki etiquette. Retrieved December 24, 2007, from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ceo_tipsheet/2007_3.htm

Collaborative Intelligence: Wikis for Business

In today’s top Fortune 500 companies, wikis are becoming thecollaborative tool of choicefor building vast store houses of corporate knowledge. Wikis are relativelyeasy touse and manage,and are surprisingly versatile in their functionality. Innovation and knowledge sharing cut right through typical bureaucratic red tape with amazing speed.Colleagues can communicate as a group much more efficiently without beinghampered by endless strings of meetings, or the literally hundreds ofemails that certain projects seem to breed among all the players involved. Communication can also be more easily facilitated withinon a global scale,utilizing a variety of language translation wikis. The constant creation and evolution of globally shared knowledgecreates a tremendouscatalyst for positive change. Business therefore canbuild and developinnovation at a speedthat simply has never been witnessed before. No longer justlone wolves in an organization, the team comes together taking the power of each member and combining it into a stronger force.

Who are using wikis for business?

According to Business Week’s Rachael King,(2007), one of the early adoptors was Intel.In 2005, Josh Bancroftneeded a way for engineers and staff to easily collaborate on internal projects. His solution was tocreate “Intelpedia”.Intelpedia is nowembraced by and utilized daily by thousands ofengineers and staffwithin the company. “Intelpedia now has amassed 5,000 pages of content and garnered 13.5 million page views. According to King (2007), corporations such as Sony, Xerox, Disney, and Microsoft alsohavebrought in wikis as a new and vitaltool for their business. King cites Andrew Mcafee, a professor at Harvard Business school, “If you did a comprehensive survey of Fortune 1,000 companies, you would probably find some sort of wiki in all of them.”

According to Bancroft (2007), corporate wikis can be used to fill a variety of needs including, “tracking industry news, setting meeting agendas, posting corporate policies, and even creating strategy documents.” Open-source software packages such as MediaWiki, and Twiki allow employees to create their own wikis without having to ask for technical IT help. Bancroft cites Ann Majchrzak and Christian Wagnerin their report for the Society of Information Management, that wikisare used by companies such as Motorola, Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, and Nokia. IBM has successfully implemented their wiki with over 125,000 active users. According to Bancroft (2007), “IBM assembled a worldwide community of 50 IBM experts in the fields of law, academia, economics, government, and technology to collaborate on the wiki. The result of that project is a collaboratively written intellectual-property manifesto that also serves as the foundation of IBM’s new patent policy.”

Wiki Security for Companies

Worried about security, who wouldn’t be? If internal corporate informationwas set free on the Internet, havoc would surely ensue.But, thanks to tighter security features, corporate wikis are less likely to face the pranks or vandalism that Wikipedia faces on a daily basis.Most corporate wikis also utilize intranets, as opposed to the Internet. Enterprise wikis software packages such as Atlassian, Socialtext, CustomerVision, and MindTouch provide the added security and access control features that are needed to keep internal company information private.

What’s next in the evolution of company wikis?

Engaging partners and customers seems to be the next step in the evolution of corporate wikis. For example, according to Bancroft (2007), Microsoft is utilizing a wiki to gather information from it’s partners around the worldwhile developing Visual Studio’s documentation. This not only encourages greater collaboration, but also allows Microsoft to enter into new markets where documentation has been previously hampered by local dialects.

How to handle exponential growth in a wiki

One caveat Bancroft (2007) reveals is that in time wikis can become unwieldy with too much information from too many sources. She cites Majchrzak in stating that there needs to be a “shaper” within the wiki environment, that is someone who helps “synthesize” the information so it is easier to read, more efficient, and therefore more usable by other members of the group.

Let’s finish off with a video by Barry Libert, entitled “7 Rules for Building a Business Community.”

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Corporate Wiki Software Solutions
1. Social Text
2. Confluence
3. Blogtronix
4. Clearspace
5. Mindtouch

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Additional Resources:Marshall School of Business:
Corporate Wiki Survey of Users – PDF ……………………………………………………………………………………………
References: King, R. (March, 2007). No rest for the wiki. Retrieved December 23, 2007, from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2007/tc20070312_740461.htm

Wikis: Wikis are evolving into the perfect collaborative tool for business and education. By now, nearly everyone has heard of, or used the famous “Wikipedia” that was launchedin 2001. But what you might not realize is that the open source power behind Wikipedia,is available toanyone. Forward thinkingbusinesses and schools are increasinglyutilizing wikis to create theirvery own collaborative resource sites.

Why usewikis?

1. Wikis are adaptable, searchable and easy to use.
2. They handle and organize a growing base of knowledge in a veryefficient and usablemanner.
3. Wikis allow for individuals to rapidlyco-construct knowledge in a free-form manner.
4. Wikis remove the chronological sortingbarriers that blogs have. (Latest postings always being postedfirst might not always be ideal.)
5. They can be password protected.
6. Information is set free and “democratized.”
7. Open source wikis are free for your use.
8. Depending on the type of wiki, they can be easily installed without programming experience.
9. Wikis can be installed on your own computer as an organizational tool.
10. Wikis can even be installed on thumbUSB drives and passed amongst the collaborators.

Here are some creative ideas for using Wikis that may help you in your business or educational environment.

Ideas for usinga Wiki in Business
(Wiki.com, 2007)

1. Project collaboration and brainstorming
2. Building a community of practice
3. Creating knowledge bases on specific topics
4. Writing documentation or FAQ’s
5. Creating specifications and architecture documents for software or other projects
6. Creating “How to Step by Step Explanations”
7. Planning and documenting events
8. Real time reports of conferences
9. Information and policies about a project
10. Developing best practices or patterns
11. Software testing and development
12. Meeting agendas and notes for organizations
13. Developing software features and other inventions
14. Solidifying an existing community through collaboration and increased connections
15. Discussing theories
16. Creating an easily searched Website with hyperlinks.

Ideas for Using Wikis in Education

1. Websites can easily be created and maintained by students separated by distance.
2. Provides a sense of community and central meeting groundfor online students to collaborate ideas.
3. Collaboratively constructing knowledgein a way that isengaging and motivating.
4. Assignments can be peer reviewed, and critiqued. Particularly writing assignments.
5. Group assignments can be easily organized, andbe a central point for documents, photos, media, etc.
6. Information is searchable.
7. Encouraging Parent – Teacher – Child communication.

History of Wikis

According to Wikipedia.org (2007), the first wiki was called the WikiWikiWeb. It was produced by Ward Cunningham in 1995. It was first only open to invited programmers, and its original intent was “to facilitate communication between software developers, and also to experiment with the new hypertext capabilities”.

According to Darryl Taft in his article written for e-Week.com(2006), Mr. Cunninghamhas said: “The power of collaborative development has only just begun to be realized, and open-source software will continue to spur more collaboration and more innovation.”

“I’m betting on open source being a big trend,” Cunningham said, chuckling at his understatement. “And it’s not just because of cost, but because of end-user innovation. No end user wants to be a programmer; they just want to get their jobs done,” he said. But more and more people with powerful tools and powerful languages will be able to work together to build better systems, he said.

“I think of software being a work €”very much like a wiki being a work €”where people see an area that’s weak and they make it stronger.”

Mary Joe Foley (2004) also interviewed Cunningham in 2004 for e-Week.com. In the interview she reports: “Cunningham emphasized the need for programmers to abandon the lone-wolf approach and instead work more collaboratively. He said the WikiWikiWeb is all about nurturing collaboration by allowing developers to elaborate when writing patterns or other pieces of software.”

Interested in reading more about WardCunningham’s work in his own words? Here is an interesting page written by him about the history of his wiki development.

Features of Corporate Wikis
Features of wikis specifically helpful to a corporation include: (Wikipedia.org, 2007)

1. Allow to glue information via quick-and-easy-to-create pages containing links to other corporate information systems, like people directories, CMS, applications, and thus build up knowledge bases.




2. Avoiding e-mail overload. Wikis allow all relevant information to be shared by people working on a given project. Conversely, only the wiki users interested in a given project need look at its associated wiki pages, in contrast to high-traffic mailing lists which may burden many subscribers with many messages, regardless of relevance to particular subscribers.




3. Access rights, roles. Users can be forbidden from viewing and/or editing given pages, depending on their department or role within the organization.




4. Building consensus. Wikis provide a framework for collaborative writing. Particularly, they allow the structured expression of views disagreed upon by authors on a same page.




5. Organizing information. Wikis allow users to structure new and existing information. As with content, the structure of data is sometimes also editable by users; see structured wiki.




6. Saving time by: Making ideas available; Sharing Knowledge, Having a common glossary, and Managing Related Information. Sometimes used is “If you do not know where to put the information, put it in the wiki”.




7. Convert informational “noise” into corporate wisdom.

Corporate Wiki Solutions
Wikipedia.org (2007):

A large set of corporate wiki solutions are available; see list of wiki software and comparison of wiki software. Wikis with the required feature set include TWiki, MoinMoin, XWiki, TikiWiki, Confluence and Socialtext. Their aim is to provide all ranges of companies with ready-made wiki solutions that can be adapted to SMEs as well as multinational corporations. Amongst those companies, the competition lies as much in corporate philosophy as in what the products look like. For example, MoinMoin and Socialtext value simplicity, where TWiki puts an emphasis on structured wikis where users can create wiki applications. Most of them have adopted an Open-Source mindset and allow developers or even users to create purposed applications.

Wiki software packages not specifically built for corporations are also used at the workplace, such as MediaWiki or DokuWiki. Although they can be used to build simple knowledgebases and internal websites, they often lack enterprise features such as fine grained access control, per page name space for attachments, or integration with other enterprise tools.

Let’s finish this posting with a sort of “campy” video on wikis vs blogs. Kennedy taking the position of wikis, and Nixon on blogs. (Be patient, the beginning skips a bit, but then the film runs smoothly.

2. Another Wiki Comparison Guide.

3. List of wiki software.

4. List of wikis written in a variety of languages.

5. Download MediaWiki: The Free open source software that powers Wikipedia.

6. Open Source Collaborative Software

7. Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful tools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

8. Educause: Use of wikis in education – Podcast

Wiki Tools: One Page

• JotSpot Live
• Writeboard
• Writely
• RallyPoint
• Zoho Writer
• StikiPad

Full Web Site

• Helping Students Education 501(c)(3)
• Wetpaint
• JotSpot
• Atlassian Confluence
• MediaWiki
• SocialText
• JotBox Wiki appliance for large enterprises
• EditMe
• Trac Project tracking wiki
• Wikispaces aimed at social groups
• PBwiki
• SeedWiki
• Schtuff
• Instiki
• Wetpaint
• LauLima
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References

Wikia.com. (2007). Uses of a Wiki. Retrieved December 12, 2007, from http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Uses_of_a_wiki.

Foley, M. (2004). Father of the wiki talks programming practices. Retrieved December 18, 2007, from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1684470,00.asp

Taft, D. (2006). Father of wiki speaks out on community and collaborative development. Retrieved December 18, 2007, from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1939982,00.asp

Wikipedia.org (2007). Corporatewiki. Retrieved December 18, 2007, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_wiki