Mass Collaboration or Mass Amateurism?: Synopsis
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-08-04
Summary:
"This study intends to contribute to a better understanding of the Wiki phenomenon as a knowledge management system which aggregates private knowledge and check to what extent information generated through anonymous and freely bestowed mass collaboration is reliable as opposed to the traditional approach. To achieve that goal, we develop a comparative study between Wikipedia and Britannica Encyclopedias, in order to confront the quality of the knowledge repository produced by them. That will allow us to reach a conclusion about the efficacy of the business models behind them ... So, we intend to find out which of the scenarios represented above is the most accurate to describe mass collaboration: the infinite monkeys theorem[1] used by Keen in The Cult of the Amateur or the ode to the 'power of the masses' of Tapscott & Williams in Wikinomics.
We used a representative random sample[2] which is composed by the articles that are comprised in both encyclopedias[3]. Each pair of articles was previously reformatted to hide its source and then graded by an expert in its subject area using a five-point scale. We asked experts to concentrate only on some[4] intrinsic aspects of the articles’ quality, namely accuracy and objectivity, and discard the contextual, representational and accessibility aspects. Whenever possible, the experts invited to participate in the study are University teachers, because they are used to grading students’ work not using the reputation of the source. The articles have been divided into four main categories: Arts & Entertainment, History & Society, Science & Technology and Travel & Geography[5]. Each main category has further been subdivided in order to find the most suitable expert to evaluate it. The average results obtained are presented below ... "