«« Wikipedia Paves the Way for Massive Collaboration FanConcert Dev Process Retrospective 1 »»
blog header image
Unequal Voices

Something that agrees with my last post, Dave Winer says: "It's not really Wikipedia's fault, it's the way online communities evolve where everyone has an equal voice."

Exactly. There's no moderation system in a wiki, it's a free-for-all. An improvement on a collaborative website could:

- Identify people who have expertise or knowledge on certain subjects.
- Prioritize these sources of information over other sources for that subject.

Then in the pool of the remaining non-"experts" you would have to seperate:

- The careful researchers who find and submit factual information, even on subjects where they are not experts.
- The sloppy people that don't know (or don't care that) they are submitting garbage.
- The saboteurs, who intentionally want to reduce the quality of the site.

Push all of that into a moderation scheme and you've got something more reliable than a free-for-all wiki. The experts get more of a voice and the saboteurs get much less.

The downside is that it's likely to be far more complicated and that reduces the barrier of entry, which in turn reduces the number of people that are likely to collaborate.

The upside? Like I mentioned before, Wikipedia has already paved the way. People will be more likely to collaborate now even though it's more difficult because:

1. They already have seen it work on Wikipedia. They know the benefits of submitting: that their work won't go to waste and will be enjoyed by others.
2. They also know they'll get credit for their submissions.

Wikipedia was never very good at crediting people -- credits are shoved in the back end with the edit history. This makes almost every Wikipedia article effectively anonymous. That in turn reduces an individual's personal responsibility to the facts because it's difficult, though not impossible, to trace errors to specific people/users.

If you insert some personal accountability measures into your new collaborative website, all of a sudden quality improves. Imagine that. Sometimes it's as simple as putting people's names on their work, like Everything2 does.

Posted at October 19, 2005 at 03:29 AM EST
Last updated October 19, 2005 at 03:29 AM EST
Comments

This what I've been thinking for a long time...

Anarchy does not seem to promote quality.
Which is something I've noticed some technical people seem to be wholly ignorant about.

"Sometimes it's as simple as putting people's names on their work"

And something as simple as that wouldn't necessitate any kind of micromanaging by a heirarchy.
But it would probably get rid of most of the real rubbish.

But to get any real high quality of information, there would have to be expertise management by a command structure.

» Posted by: Chloe at October 20, 2005 02:28 PM

I think people need to take responsibility for what they input. It's all about street cred', yo. Back in the day when I typed out a FAQ or HOWTO in that nice text with ASCII art all around, your name went proudly on the bottom. It made you feel responsible for your piece.

I would never want to be associated with "crappy" work. So if I ever put out something, and my name is at the bottom, you better believe that I actually worked hard at it. Whereas random anonymous thoughts, for the majority of them, are not as respectable as those of actual people who sign their name at the bottom.

It's human nature.

» Posted by: roy at October 20, 2005 02:36 PM
Google
 
Search scope: Web ryanlowe.ca
http://www.ryanlowe.ca/blog/archives/001369_unequal_voices.php
www.ryanlowe.ca
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
23790
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GNULG676QT6MYT5EP362PLPRLEUL5TZZ
<urn:uuid:974d0b5d-4f93-44df-970a-edf915016cfb>
2013-05-23T03:07:20Z
174.143.206.6
sha1:BNZQW5P2T32P5WHLEVA6LF7KRT3DQUUP
<urn:uuid:7c4c2a84-bae7-4242-b30e-2c1009529d99>
http://www.ryanlowe.ca/blog/archives/001369_unequal_voices.php
response
<urn:uuid:a1853630-8fcc-467b-ba53-6b2f4dbe18b3>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf