Here comes everybody - Printable Version

Here comes everybody - Printable Version

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Here comes everybody - ファブリス - 2008-07-14

A speech from Clay Shirky where he explains the various ways in which people can now collaborate online:

Clay Shirkey Wrote:So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

Inspiring stuff.

Here comes everybody - furrykef - 2008-07-14

The depressing thing about Wikipedia is that, despite all that time and thought that goes into it, a lot of it is badly-written. A lot of it is utterly littered with errors of punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc., to say nothing of the bigger problems such as factual accuracy, clear presentation, etc. A lot of that time is wasted cleaning up messes that other people have made. I know that I have probably about 2000 edits now -- each one done by hand -- that consist solely of corrections of some kind. My efforts probably have not even put a dent into the grand scheme of things.

- Kef

Here comes everybody - aircawn - 2008-07-16

That was a great watch, cheers for the link.

furrykef Wrote:My efforts probably have not even put a dent into the grand scheme of things.

Yup. But looking at it another way, it's remarkable that Wikipedia itself exists. A site built primarily from anonymous people around the globe collaborating and contributing their knowledge to the rest of the world. The end result may not be perfect, but hey, what is?