W1. What do I know about Wikipedia and what do I want to learn about it? /posted by Sojeong Yeon

W1. What do I know about Wikipedia and what do I want to learn about it? 

 

Wikipedia is a large cooperative community. There are certain rules, norms and cultures in the community. And there is always conflict. On the other hand, community produces productive output. There are also such things in Wikipedia. The goal that Wikipedia, a community, stands for is “a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” I think what is implied by the goal is more important than the feasibility of the goal. While expressing such a goal, what is the advantage of Wikipedia in the flood of information?

 

I thought of the following interesting points regarding these questions. First, considering that Wikipedia is based on the form of an encyclopedia, it is a huge task that extracts meaning from a vast amount of information in the digital information era. It is a work of ‘signifying.’ Wikipidians collect fragmentary objective facts that are scattered and have less value by itself, and attach meaning and conceptualization to them. This process is very valuable if we regard it as a 'social-scientific' process of discovering the correlation and causality of two events that seem unrelated to sociological research. Second, society is changing rapidly so it takes too much time and expense to create a paper encyclopedia for the newly discovered social phenomenon in real time, and it is too inefficient and inefficient. It is also difficult to spread to more and more people around the world. Wikipedia on the Internet makes it possible. Some of the concepts and knowledge that have existed in the past are gathered together and accumulated, but there is also an advantage that the present concepts can be dictated and made more quickly and in real time.

 

I want to learn about the following thing-the principle and power of collective intelligence- through the class. First, you can look at two aspects of Wikipedia. The one(first level) is the 'combination and convergence of information.' The another(second level) is the fact that information is created and shared 'among people'. At this time, the synergy occurs at the moment of moving from the first level to the second level. This is the very power of 'collective intelligence'. There are several conditions for collective intelligence to be possible. 'Autonomy' is one of them. Human beings want to show off what they know, and at the same time have a nature that they want to know and teach. It is fundamentally related to the old philosophical question of why humans help others who are not directly related to themselves. I want to deeply understand these principles related to 'moral reciprocity' and 'self-satisfaction' through Wikipedia.