The “power law distribution” or “long tail” phenomenon, as seen in behavior online on the Wikipedia, suggests that the concept of an average user of wikipedia is meaningless. Support your answer: how do you think a local, “JMU only” version of the Wikipedia would compare to the worldwide version? Would it be very similar? Higher quality? Less quality? Why?
I will admit that I am a little confused about the concept of the power law distribution. According to figure 5-1, there is a sharp drop off point between the top few contributors and the rest of the participants, so wouldn’t this concept apply more to larger social systems with more disproportionate contributions? As stated by Shirky, “Imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them…the spontaneous division of labor driving Wikipedia wouldn’t be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality.” With this said, would Wikipedia be a better tool in a larger social system because there is more inequality amongst users? This makes me believe that a “JMU only” version of Wikipedia would have less quality compared to the worldwide version. Students at JMU are alike in a general sense: education, involvement, motivation, race, income. I feel that since we all have this general stereotype, the average nature of our social system would be meaningless to Wikipedia.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
We've put all of these terms and concepts in a blender and let them go around. The basic idea with the average user is that we cannot define an average person... the wikipedia's large user base has enough diversity to make it work.
ReplyDeleteIn the same vein, JMU has a less diverse population, but it still is diverse. Only a real test or experiment would tell. I believe it could have some quality, but I think it would lack the variety that a long-tail model would predict. You likely wouldn't find the obscure articles that you could find on the wikipedia. This doesn't mean it would be less useful to students: it's focus, rather than variety, could make it a popular resource.