User-Generated Content Vs. Experts

Jay points out a Newsweek piece which suggests that the era of user-generated content is going to change in favor of fact-checking and more rigorous standards. The author points to Google's Knol and the "people-powered" search engine Mahalo as examples of the demand for more accurate information sharing. Quoting: "User-generated sites like Wikipedia, for all the stuff they get right, still find themselves in frequent dust-ups over inaccuracies, while community-posting boards like Craigslist have never been able to keep out scammers and frauds. Beyond performance, a series of miniscandals has called the whole "bring your own content" ethic into question. Last summer researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the reference site's users make more than 50 percent of its edits. Perhaps more notoriously, four years ago a computer glitch revealed that Amazon.com's customer-written book reviews are often written by the book's author or a shill for the publisher. 'The wisdom of the crowds has peaked,' says Calacanis. 'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'"

Comments

Re:Wtf

[Jasin Natael]

I would also like to point out that this is a very common pattern of how things freaking actually work in the real world. You can find probably on the order of tens of millions of examples for this disparity in the real world. It's the Pareto Principle (aka, the 80/20 rule), and the concentration is basically fractal in nature. The smaller the sample you choose, the greater the disproportionality is likely to be.

Some possible examples (this is a thought experiment. I don't know the actual stats, but all of these are believable, at least on the face of it):

• Over 50% of all adultery is committed by less than 1% of the population
• More than 50% of all food is grown by 1% of all agricultural companies
• Over half of all charitable contributions are made by less than 1% of the people who took charitable deductions on their taxes
• More than half of all hours logged on WoW are attributable to 1% of its user base
• More than half of all Slashdot posts are submitted by less than 1% of its user base.

This does not a scandal make. In fact, it would be a hell of a lot more surprising if something of Wikipedia's nature didn't follow this statistical pattern. To me, it only proves that Wikipedia is genuinely organic, instead of an artificial system of quotas and coercion that tries to force everyone to submit equally. Would we even want a Wikipedia where the apathetic masses are forced or paid to submit information?