[Wikipedia-l] Stan's evolutionary concept

Wed Jan 5 14:54:41 UTC 2005

On Wednesday 05 January 2005 08:53, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> J.F. de Wolff wrote:
> > Articles develop Darwinistically. They emerge from primordial soup
> > (substubs, anon newbie edits) and evolve as more people add material.
>
> The essence of my talk in Berlin was to argue against this view of how
> wikipedia operates.  Obviously, there is something to it if we
> streeeeeeetch the "Darwinistic" metaphor to the breaking point.  But
> in the main, I think this analogy is one which misleads us into
> incorrect conclusions.

As an aside, and being a non-expert, that sounds right to me -- are the 
slides from your talk available? To actually claim something as Darwinian 
one should have variation, reproduction, and selection. In the Wikipedia 
context there is variation and selection but I do not think one sees a 
continuance of character in the articles themselves. To really think about 
this in a Darwinian context one would need to ask what is the object of 
selection and reproduction? It clearly is not the articles themselves, what 
would more likely be the culture of Wikipedia itself as reproduced in the 
socialization of newcomers. So the Wikipedia culture of friendliness, 
populism, persistence, etc. is selected for given the collaborative 
character of this work, its historical momentum, and reproduced via 
socialization. A potential perspective on the question of "expertise" is 
then why experts are not selected in this environment? A simple reason is 
that they are used to competing and surviving in a different environment 
with similar goals (knowledge production) but otherwise quite different: 
simply, they lack patience -- or simply do not have the time -- when the 
authority granted to them in that other environment does not translate to 
this one.