Transcript Wikipedia Organization

Cerebrio, LLC
Crowd Sourcing:
The Wisdom of the Crowd,
or The Tyranny of the Mob?
Wm F. Marovitz, PhD
President and CEO
An OMNICOM Group Company
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History of Publishing
History of Publishing
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Base of Inventions
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Social Issues
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Galileo, An Example of Intellectual Freedom
vs. Authority
…and his last laugh?
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Modern Publishing
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Academic Scholarship
Academic Scholarship
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Quoting your sources
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Honesty
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Ethical
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Original Expression
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Withstand Peer Review
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Dissemination of Ideas
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Cerebrio, LLC
Publishing Company
Matching Market Needs to Distribution of
Intellectual Properties
Publishing Company
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Marketing
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Sales
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Administration
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Editorial
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Production
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New Technologies
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Evolved Publishing Company: Production
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The Wisdom of the
Crowd
Wisdom of the Crowd
 The concept that the aggregate wisdom of many people is better than the
work of an individual is not new. A few examples:
– Stock Markets
– Marketplace determination of price of oranges, and everything else
– Spot Oil markets
– Ox weighing, Jelly Bean Jar Number Guessing
— One example, Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a British Scientist, believed that "the
stupidity and wrong-headedness of many men and women being so great as to be
scarcely credible.“ To his surprise Dalton noticed a contest to guess the weight of an ox.
The average of the crowd came within 1 lb of the weight of the animal.
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Originality vs. the Herd
 When you consider great creative future-changing events or
concepts —Galileo, Newton, Darwin, the Framers of the US
Constitution, Einstein, Watson & Crick — all individuals or small
groups
– The introduction of such novel concepts were often long coming or
had a difficult path. Consider the frequent problems or difficulties
getting ideas accepted against censors, authorities, peer-review
and/or against the structure of the societies to which these
individuals belonged
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Cerebrio, LLC
Social Networks
Market Survey: Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS)
and MySpace Survey
 To determine how people use social networks (“SN”); 3,000 people
14-40
 Level of emotional commitment to SN is high
 Developing trends
 Results
– Individuals from 14-40 spent more time on SN than surfing the net
– By a survey instrument Identified ~10% who were “Future “Shapers ;
FS”; value to marketers for a future look.
— FS tended to be more educated, slightly older. Slightly more female about
fifty percent are married (15% > than most social networkers
— Very media driven with the exception of console games
— Very driven by interaction as compared to more passive media
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Entire Social Networking Population versus
“Future Shapers” Hours Spent per Week
40
35
30
25
TV
Cell Phone
Surfing
Games
MP3
20
15
10
5
0
Normal
Future Shapers
Redrawn from:Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) and MySpace Survey
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Social Networks, Virtual Friendships
 The nature of branding seems to be different in Social Network
environments.
– The experience is based on “friending” not on apparent hierarchical structure
— But what lurks “under the hood”?
 Four Precepts (from TNS and MySpace Survey ):
– Communications Brand communication must integrate “friending”, wireless
interactivity, instant communications
– Consistent Expression As consumers increase their social networking,
brands must use parallel presence to remain consistent across various
modalities and within a social network environment
– Sharing Future Shapers will carry brand messaging internal to social
networks. Providing tools, and supporting facilities can strengthen a brands
platform
– Passion Social Networks build passion and strong affiliation that can be
extended from the network onto brands that pay attention
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Using Virtual Friendships
 Company must understand network structure and the depth of
friending to successfully build brand
– The Social Network becomes the source of the authority to
authenticate the “knowledge” or correctness
— Self-contained authority stemming from the group itself
– Compare this to the use the Encyclopedia Britannica and its external
authority; the company vs. the readership/customer
– In a network the developed product is not separable from the community;
nonetheless the largest percentage of the user base is not active
 Specialized (Sermo, to be discussed later), authenticated networks
may be both inherently safer with regard to exposure of participation,
but potentially more limited and control has the potential for
becoming very undemocratic and controlled
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Wikipedia Organization
Wikipedia Organization
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Wikipedia Foundation
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MediaWiki Software
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Organizational Structure
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Wikipedia Community
Wikipedia Community
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Principles
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"Pillars of Wisdom"
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Problems
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Different From Conventional
Encyclopedias
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Warnings from the “pages” of Wikipedia
 Caution: It is always considered a bad idea to cite an encyclopedia in
academic research papers.
 Do your research assignment properly. Remember that any encyclopedia is
a starting point for research, not an ending point.
 However, citation of Wikipedia in research papers may not be considered
acceptable, because Wikipedia is not considered a creditable source.
 While reading Wikipedia articles for research, remember to consider the
information carefully, and never treat what is on Wikipedia as wholesale
truth.
 “Even Wales has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia entry—eighteen
times[34] in the past year. He is particularly sensitive about references to
the porn traffic on his Web portal. "Adult content" or "glamour photography"
are the terms that he prefers, though, as one user pointed out on the site,
they are perhaps not the most precise way to describe lesbian strip-poker
threesomes. (In January, Wales agreed to a compromise: "erotic
photography.")”
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Wales Interview
 Q - How does Wikipedia stack up to Britannica?
 By number of entries, we're about six times as large, but that's an unfair
comparison, since we slice up entries differently. The fairest
comparison is by number of words, and we're twice the size of
Britannica by that count….
 An interesting comparison, not to Britannica but to other top sites, is
traffic. We now have more traffic than Paypal, more than
USAToday.com, and we're close to NYTimes.com. We're doing this all
with volunteers who are managing the servers and doing
everything themselves, and that's pretty astonishing.
 I was recently on a panel with the head of USAToday.com. He said
they have 300 million pageviews a month. I said that's good; we
have 400 million. Then he said he had 180 people on staff. I said I
have one part-time person who helps me with the servers. There's
something new going on here. It's not about broadcast, it's about
interaction.
Google Search 9/10; “How does Wikipedia Make Money”
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Does Wikipedia Make Money?
 Q - Do
you have any plans to sell Wikipedia or make money
from it?
 “Not Wikipedia. I do have Wikicities, a for-profit venture, on the
side. But I'm pretty firm about the big-picture mission about
Wikipedia: it's a free encyclopedia for every person on the
planet. That's what drives my entire life. I have enough money
that I don't need money. I mean, I have a Ferrari. OK, now
what? Let's do something cool. It's more cool to think about
totally changing the landscape - for example, by radically
undercutting the market for proprietary textbooks.”
Interview: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wals
by Mark Hurst, March 10, 2005
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A Sector-Based Closed Community
Networking Site
 Sermo (Latin for conversation) formed an Alliance with the AMA (May 30, 2007)
– Closed physician-only community; only authenticated at time of joining; as of 4 months
ago claimed 20,000 physician members (~600+K physicians in USA)
– All postings accompanied by questionnaire, all postings are graded by community
— Participants directly rated over their history of postings. Not all equal
 Commercial groups can “pay to watch”; and pose questions to the group. This
can give nearly immediate answer to marketing issues
 Claim that Serno’s community “has changed the practice of medicine; “makes
good medicine great”
 Same worrisome issues as with Wikipedia, but here user authentication at
time of registration authenticates each member is a practicing physician
provides some minimum “authority” and establishes a true “peer” relationship.
 Company claims principle driver of physicians joining is professional loneliness
– We often have a large city bias in thinking about physicians, but rural
practitioners and specialists in relatively good sized towns have few peers and are
“professionally lonely”
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Other Social Networking Sites
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A Word on Blogs
 Vanity and/or Personal Publishing has long been with us
 Recent developments have allowed individuals to more cost-effectively produce
and sell hard books that are self-published without printing to inventor, and
using the Internet as sales vehicle
 Amateur authors write on any topic they choose and direct their work to niche
markets that are so small that they can never be commercialized
 Similarly, the Internet has allowed the dissemination of large uncontrolled social
networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace (college-age and now
everyone), LiveJournal (personal journals), Linkedin (business), and many
others
 But mainstream media and the blogosphere are merging. Consider Murdock’s
recent purchase of MySpace; blending the two into one empire.
 There are risks-- the case of Dr. Robert P. Lindeman, a pediatrician and
blogger who commented on his own trial, and subsequently under oath
admitted that he was “Doctor Flea”. Case resulted in large cash settlement
shortly after he was outed. How anonymous is any one on the web?
– Another Blogger made the distinction between Sermo and medical blogs,
“It’s in Sermo’s closed nature and authentication of all members as physician”
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Social Networks—So What?
 Surprising level of participation changes the $ value of IP
 Who or what drives a crowd; when does a crowd become a horde?
– Are new ideas blunted? Erosion of personal accomplishment?
– Delphi Programs (Rand Corp) method to lead group to consensus
(blunted output?)
 Who or what owns the IP, Copyright, Trademarks, Patents, derived
products?
– Does such group sourcing simply redefine all of the above?
 What about licensing from a tax exempt entity to a taxable one? What
is the tax consequence of building a resource that then gets exploited
commercially. Do you expense or capitalize the taxable value of base?
 When does an ethical society become a crowd and inversely?
 Potential for developing specific niche markets that could never be
financially viable
 Currency is unlikely to be met by conventional IP
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Some Personal Views on Markets
 We may be concerned about the cannibalization of our products, but
users couldn’t care less
 If you give data away for free, someone still makes money. If you do a
Google search and the content is good you return to Google. Ads get
displayed, money does change hands, it just may not be your hands
 As the “fire hose” of information increases in volume it becomes more
difficult to drink. Specialized, very high-value publication assembled
from “free content” becomes a very real opportunity. This is much more
than simply being a search agent, it is a very real publishing business,
maintaining standard academic methods and analysis, just for a very
small audience
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Cerebrio, LLC
Wm. F. Marovitz, PhD
[email protected]
or
[email protected]
Backup Slides
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Summary
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Summary
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Summary
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Modern Publishing
Cerebrio, LLC
Cerebrio, LLC
Academic Scholarship
Academic Scholarship
Cerebrio, LLC
Quoting your sources
Cerebrio, LLC
Honesty
Cerebrio, LLC
Ethical
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Original Expression
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Withstand Peer Review
Cerebrio, LLC