Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy. - By Chris Wilson - Slate Magazine
For all its limitations - a lingering sense of unreliability being foremost - Wikipedia has been a remarkable success story. Who would have thought, when it began, that an encyclopedia written by anyone who felt like adding their two cents would turn out to be as accurate, not to mention greatly larger in scale, than Britannica. But is it an example of the wise crowd at work? Chris Wilson at Slate argues that it is not, and that “chaperones”, an elite group of uber-contributors, dominate.
The problem with Wilson’s argument is that it is based on one statistical calculation, the meaning of which is not at all clear. That statistic says that 1% of Wikipedia contributors make about half the edits on the site. What we don’t know is how many people that 1% constitutes. If it’s 10,000 people, that’s a pretty large crowd. We also don’t know what kind of edits that 1% of contributors is making. There is reason to believe that much of it is administrative and grammatical rather than content-altering in nature. Meanwhile, much more than 1% of contributors are making the other 50% of edits.
The Slate article reveals a misunderstanding of the wise crowd phenomenon. To gain the benefit of the crowd’s wisdom requires a large and diverse group, but not necessarily every single person who makes an edit on Wikipedia. Even taking the 1% stat (which was itself arrived at with questionable methodology), if that comprises a large and diverse group, then the phenomenon will likely work.