Hi, James!
Thanks for the link to your paper. It was interesting reading.
I think your observations about FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) are
very relevant also to Wikipedia. WP has many of the same characteristics, as
both are based on information objects, an WP edit is pretty much the same
as a FLOSS patch, WP has revision control just as FLOSS has CVS, and, with
the introduction of the new feedback mechanism, WP will have something
moving in the general direction of the issue/bug tracker of FLOSS. The
significant difference between WP and FLOSS is the scale. As you observed,
FLOSS projects have quite small numbers of contributors, clearly WP has a
lot lot more. However, with respect to an average WP article, the number of
the contributors is perhaps closer to that of a FLOSS project, still bigger
though.
The observations of how work is done in FLOSS are fairly true of WP as well.
I think most WP editors like to work on topics that interest them in some
way (that's the utility) and do so in bite-sized chunks that fit the time
they are willing to invest. WP editors do seem slightly more willing to
rewrite whole articles (or large sections of them) than doing version 2 in
a FLOSS project but, then, articles are typically smaller than FLOSS code
bases so it is not as big a task as a complete refactoring of a code base.
What WP appears to have is more people willing to do the housekeeping,
those committed editors who roam around adding geo-locations and infoboxes
and categories and standardising the capitalisation of article titles and
the recent change patrol and the admins, etc. It is less clear to me what
the utility they are getting from their efforts (some might be control
freaks but I suspect the majority are just genuinely motivated by altruism
-- a utility in itself). I guess these are the polishers in FLOSS and
probably, in percentage terms, they exist in similar proportions and hence
are more visible in WP because of its greater scale.
And I think the low level of co-work in FLOOS is equivalent to the long
tail of WP editors that I suspect just edit and never look at a talk page or
the edit history.
Now to return to your question What's at stake here?. I think the answer
to that is pretty simple. The WWW provides the basis for
collaboration/cooperation/coordination (whatever you like to call it and
define it) on a scale previously unimaginable. Just look at Google,
Facebook, eBay etc to see how the scale of doing anything can change with
the WWW. However, socially, we only have the management tools to work at a
much smaller scale, especially with volunteers. Indeed, I recently did some
work with a sector (that I won't name) but which has a lot of people willing
to volunteer -- however, they make very little use of the volunteers in
practice because (amongst other reasons) they find there is too high a staff
cost in managing the volunteers. The reason Wikipedia fascinates me (as a
subject of study -- it fascinates me just to read it too) is that it has
found a way to harness the largely uncoordinated efforts of many volunteers
into a phenomenally effective resource. Sure, we know there is a small core
of employees, but it's small dollars compared to the equivalent dollar-value
of the leisure time of the volunteers (yep, economists know how to put a
value on everything!). And of course, it's not just volunteers, many
organisations would like to know how to reduce all those layers of middle
management -- the ideal corporate world would surely be an army of workers
at the coalface managed by just the CEO.
So if you can figure out the social and technical models for efficient and
effective mass collaboration and then translate that into the software
system to underpin it, then I think you've got a winner on your hands that
could impact into so many spheres of our lives.
Now, a lot of people have taken a simplistic view that Wikipedia has proved
that wikis are good for harnessing the power of a world of volunteers and
started rolling out wikis for other purposes (indeed, often using a
customised version of Wikipedia's own code base since it too is freely
available). Some of these have achieved their purpose, others haven't. I
don't think the secret ingredient is just wiki technology. Indeed,
James' paper talks about what happens when an organisation tries to do open
source internally, which often fails because the social context is
different. I think the answer is to find the patterns of social/technical
that succeed and, for this purpose, studying WP and other successful
large-scale WWW sites is highly informative. For example, why does Amazon
beat other online book retailers hands down? The prevailing wisdom is that
the users have invested in Amazon through contributing reviews, ratings,
lists, etc, whereas most online book sellers are just flogging products
with reviews supplied by the publishers. Why does Facebook succeed? Why does
eBay succeed? Or TripAdvisor? Clearly these sites
