Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Wikipedia's Kittens

Just found a great blog
http://wikip.blogspot.com/search/label/sociology

Quoting:

"....a generalized unit of contributor motivation called a kitten.

1 kitten = the amount of motivation needed to get 1 person to spend 1 minute trying to improve an article

We can say, quite literally, that Wikipedia runs on kittens. In fact, entrepreneurs discover this every day when they try to start a "crowdsourcing" site and nobody shows up. So, what generates kittens? Foremost, it's the possibility of someone else learning from what you wrote -- not just immediately, but at any time in the future"

Kittens are born when there is a perception that the words one write will survive for some time.... something like this, to go by

Number of views on a given day = (Number of views per day).(Chance of surviving one day) ^ (Number of Days that have passed)
With a 1-in-ten-thousand chance of being destroyed each day, the article will rack up exactly seven million views over its lifetime.


Like the author says - thats a LOT of kittens!

Friday, July 25, 2008

Why Wikipedia Succeeded


Larry Sanger (Wikipedia's cofounder)'s take on why Wikipedia succeeded.
Although rather old (2005), the feature has some great insights.

http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/19/1746205&tid=95


In short, these are the factors
  1. Open content license. We promised contributors that their work would always remain free for others to read. This, as is well known, motivates people to work for the good of the world--and for the many people who would like to teach the whole world, that's a pretty strong motivation.
  2. Focus on the encyclopedia. We said that we were creating an encyclopedia, not a dictionary, etc., and we encouraged people to stick to creating the encyclopedia and not use the project as a debate forum.
  3. Openness. Anyone could contribute. Everyone was specifically made to feel welcome. (E.g., we encouraged the habit of writing on new contributors' user pages, "Welcome to Wikipedia!" etc.) There was no sense that someone would be turned away for not being bright enough, or not being a good enough writer, or whatever.
  4. Ease of editing. Wikis are pretty easy for most people to figure out. In other collaborative systems (like Nupedia), you have to learn all about the system first. Wikipedia had an almost flat learning curve.
  5. Collaborate radically; don't sign articles. Radical collaboration, in which (in principle) anyone can edit any part of anyone else's work, is one of the great innovations of the open source software movement. On Wikipedia, radical collaboration made it possible for work to move forward on all fronts at the same time, to avoid the big bottleneck that is the individual author, and to burnish articles on popular topics to a fine luster.
  6. Offer unedited, unapproved content for further development. This is required if one wishes to collaborate radically. We encouraged putting up their unfinished drafts--as long as they were at least roughly correct--with the idea that they can only improve if there are others collaborating. This is a classic principle of open source software. It helped get Wikipedia started and helped keep it moving. This is why so many original drafts of Wikipedia articles were basically garbage (no offense to anyone--some of my own drafts were sometimes garbage), and also why it is surprising to the uninitiated that many articles have turned out very well indeed.
  7. Neutrality. A firm neutrality policy made it possible for people of widely divergent opinions to work together, without constantly fighting. It's a way to keep the peace.
  8. Start with a core of good people. I think it was essential that we began the project with a core group of intelligent good writers who understood what an encyclopedia should look like, and who were basically decent human beings.
  9. Enjoy the Google effect. We had little to do with this, but had Google not sent us an increasing amount of traffic each time they spidered the growing website, we would not have grown nearly as fast as we did. (See below.)

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Defining Knowledge

Came across this quite elucidating (yes, I've used the word "elucidating"!) definition, explanation about Knowledge...

http://www.systems-thinking.org/kmgmt/kmgmt.htm

"
    • A collection of data is not information.
    • A collection of information is not knowledge.
    • A collection of knowledge is not wisdom.
    • A collection of wisdom is not truth.

The idea is that information, knowledge, and wisdom are more than simply collections. Rather, the whole represents more than the sum of its parts and has a synergy of its own.

We begin with data, which is just a meaningless point in space and time, without reference to either space or time. It is like an event out of context, a letter out of context, a word out of context. The key concept here being "out of context." And, since it is out of context, it is without a meaningful relation to anything else. When we encounter a piece of data, if it gets our attention at all, our first action is usually to attempt to find a way to attribute meaning to it. We do this by associating it with other things. If I see the number 5, I can immediately associate it with cardinal numbers and relate it to being greater than 4 and less than 6, whether this was implied by this particular instance or not. If I see a single word, such as "time," there is a tendency to immediately form associations with previous contexts within which I have found "time" to be meaningful. This might be, "being on time," "a stitch in time saves nine," "time never stops," etc. The implication here is that when there is no context, there is little or no meaning. So, we create context but, more often than not, that context is somewhat akin to conjecture, yet it fabricates meaning."

Monday, July 21, 2008

Model for Viral Growth

One of the things in my mind is to create a sufficiently accurate model to predict viral growth - While digging, I came across this very interesting blog post
http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/an-excellent-excel-model-of-viral-growth/
with a link here:
http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2008/03/facebook-viral.html?cid=106420002#comment-106420002

Some others
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/07/17/predicting-growth-with-appaholic/
http://www.skelliewag.org/the-butterfly-growth-model-224.htm