From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds, begins with Francis Galton's anecdote about an ox-weighing contest at a country fair: for a half-shilling, one could purchase a ticket on which to write an estimate of the slaughtered and dressed weight of a displayed living ox. The ticket with the guess closest to the actual weight would win a prize. Galton found that the mean of all guesses was in fact more accurate than the best guess, even though the guessers included livestock experts. This is a good illustration of the fact that a collective judgment may often be more correct than the judgment of any individual expert — something which appears to be true in financial markets, for example.
Wikipedia is a mechanism for producing collective judgments about the accuracy and importance of factual statements. I think this makes Wikipedia very exciting — any statement placed in Wikipedia is immediately subject to review and revision, and if everyone is animated by the same sense of trying to achieve truth, the text can quite rapidly evolve to something accurate and balanced.
[edit] What I'm doing here
My original plan was to contribute to a few articles on 19th century social and intellectual history, and I began by adding an article on Jonathan Baxter Harrison and contributing to a few related articles, especially those dealing with Spiritualism. Finding that it was fun, I worked on a few articles having to do with my work in economics and anthropology, such as Peace studies, Neolithic Europe, Standard cross-cultural sample, Galton's problem, Kwoma, Regional science, Clarence Edwin Ayres, Walter Isard, and George Murdock. I've also written a few articles that have to do with things Danish, such as Louis Pio, and have worked a bit on some articles having to do with Turkey, such as Turkification.
But I'm also interested in observing how Wikipedia works. Wikipedia is a project requiring the cooperation of tens of thousands of strangers, where rules have evolved to channel behavior in positive directions. This makes Wikipedia a kind of laboratory in which one can observe the problems of cooperation and the ways in which rules help mitigate those problems. So I've begun (ever so slowly) to work on a paper about the dynamics of Wikipedia. As I get time, I will put a few observations about those dynamics on a blog.
[edit] Who I am
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Identity
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This user thinks we can all get along just fine. |
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| R |
This user is an aficionado of the open source statistical package R. |
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The Barnstar of Diligence |
| To Anthon, for always "going the extra mile" to bring good sense to WP, and making your edits really count... Johnfos 01:30, 7 October 2007 (UTC) |
