By: Stephanie Aanstoos, Account Executive
Wikipedia is perhaps the best example of “collaborative production,” a term described by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations as one of the effects of the Internet. Collaborative production and Shirky’s analysis of Wikipedia can be broken down into five key points:
- Group editing- Wikipedia is “self-correcting” or “self-healing” because of the number of people participating, editing and combining knowledge to constantly improve articles and add new information.
- Spontaneous division of labor- Different users take on different roles from content creators to fact checkers to proofreaders, but it is completely unmanaged. The spontaneous division of labor allows for individual contributions to be incremental, substantial or even inaccurate, but they are all provisional and subject to further review. Not all contributors have to be competent, and this actually helps generate more articles and edits: more people are willing to improve something bad than create a masterpiece from scratch.
- Process not a product- Wikipedia is a publish-then-filter platform, like most social media platforms, and it runs on the principal that “new errors will be introduced less frequently than existing ones will be corrected.” The ongoing process of users adding content and other users editing content will never be completed.
- Proper law distribution- With Wikipedia, and pretty much all the social media we see today, there is a great imbalance of participation which actually “drives large social systems,” and, “the imbalance becomes more extreme the higher the ranking.” Shirky points out that by definition, most participant are below average. While this may seem strange at first, it applies to many social situations and explains why one part (person, blog, user, group, etc.) is never representative of the whole.
- Reward those who invest in it- Wikis grow if enough people care. Wikipedia became a “coordinating resource” because enough people thought to use it as one and now go to it as a reference tool. Both amateurs and experts invest in improving Wikipedia because its success benefits them as both creators and users.
Wikipedia is not perfect and would vanish just as quickly as it grew if people stopped caring. There is a constant battle between the vandals and those willing to continually make corrections to keep the content as accurate and high-quality as possible—Shirky claims love is what keeps it all going. Strangers are now working together for a common cause with no structure or organization thanks to the technology and a shared love of the process known as Wikipedia.