Difference between revisions of "Chapter 17"

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[[File:Chapter 17.jpg|thumb|right|200px| Because she was a woman, because she was an administrator on Wikipedia, and because she had once blocked him]]
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[[File:Chapter 16.jpg|thumb|right|260px| Wikipedia has been created without any apparent design]]
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<blockquote>It had begun to spiral out of control a few weeks before then. It started with the creepy, ‘too long, didn’t read’ emails, mentioning her children by name and suggesting what would happen when the local sex offenders got to find out their personal information. Then came the wacky website, and the cyber-rape pages. Then images of dead people and autopsies. He suggested getting pictures of her family and photoshopping them onto corpses, so she could ponder on mortality, and so on. In the end, his emails started hinting of physical violence. He was doing this because she was a woman, because she was an administrator on Wikipedia, and because she had once blocked him. </blockquote>
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<blockquote>Unlike an architect who represents a building on a drawing board, a termite is unable to represent the termite nest that it is helping to build, probably not even in its understanding, which  is limited to a handful of rules. If you come across a woodchip and you are ''not'' already carrying one, then pick it up. If you ''are'' carrying one, then ''drop'' it. If there is any sense in which a termite is ''trying'' to do something, then following those simple rules is all it is trying to do.  It is not trying to build a handsome termite mound, even though that is the end result.</blockquote>
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Can volunteers work well online with the mentally ill and the criminally insane, many of whom are drawn to Wikipedia like moths to a flame? “It is emotionally and physically draining. While some were mostly annoying time sinks who seemed to be just desperately seeking the attention they must have lacked in their real lives, others have displayed all the signs of full-blown psychosis, particularly in engaging in cyberstalking both on and off Wiki”, says one.  
 
  
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But the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t want Wikipedians knowing about this. “They are afraid that if it became generally known that women who edit Wikipedia are liable to be stalked, women might be even less likely to participate. So they don’t take any action that might be publicly visible (such as, for example, seeking a protective order forbidding a known sex offender from attending their events, which would be a trivial matter to obtain) because of that risk. The most important thing is increasing participation. There’s nothing wrong with concealing safety risks if it furthers that goal”.
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Many people, astonished by its rapid growth into a comprehensive and organised source of human knowledge in the first decade of the twentieth century, have compared Wikipedia to an ‘emergent system’.  Without any apparent hierarchy or management structure, or any form of centralised decision making, and without any specific role or standing for experts, Wikipedians have in less than ten years created something that ''looks'' like an encyclopedia, and which contains more than three million articles in nearly a million categories. Yet it has been created without any apparent design.
  
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Is there ''actually'' a group intelligence at work?  To understand this better, we test a Wikipedia article, created in 2001, and assess the quality of the article and of the individual contributions, to see whether the overall quality is greater than the sum of its parts. Has the article been improved by some ‘unspecified quasi-Darwinian process’? Do unqualified editors add anything of value, or do they cause harm by making it difficult to maintain, preventing improvement and driving away those who are capable of improving it? 
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==See also==
 
==See also==
 
*[[Chapter 16]]
 
*[[Chapter 16]]
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Latest revision as of 16:35, 5 April 2014

Wikipedia has been created without any apparent design

Unlike an architect who represents a building on a drawing board, a termite is unable to represent the termite nest that it is helping to build, probably not even in its understanding, which is limited to a handful of rules. If you come across a woodchip and you are not already carrying one, then pick it up. If you are carrying one, then drop it. If there is any sense in which a termite is trying to do something, then following those simple rules is all it is trying to do. It is not trying to build a handsome termite mound, even though that is the end result.

Many people, astonished by its rapid growth into a comprehensive and organised source of human knowledge in the first decade of the twentieth century, have compared Wikipedia to an ‘emergent system’. Without any apparent hierarchy or management structure, or any form of centralised decision making, and without any specific role or standing for experts, Wikipedians have in less than ten years created something that looks like an encyclopedia, and which contains more than three million articles in nearly a million categories. Yet it has been created without any apparent design.

Is there actually a group intelligence at work? To understand this better, we test a Wikipedia article, created in 2001, and assess the quality of the article and of the individual contributions, to see whether the overall quality is greater than the sum of its parts. Has the article been improved by some ‘unspecified quasi-Darwinian process’? Do unqualified editors add anything of value, or do they cause harm by making it difficult to maintain, preventing improvement and driving away those who are capable of improving it?


See also

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