Emergence & The Excellent Encyclopedia for Everyone

Who'd Want Wikipedia?

For a long time, teachers and academic institutions have discouraged the use of Wikipedia, instead pushing their students to learn from and cite published academic papers. They frowned on Wikipedia because of its public curation and low barrier-to-entry to edit. Anyone can edit this public resource, you don't need degrees, credentials, or publisher agreements.

It's easy to see why teachers might hesitate to allow students to trust Wikipedia. There is little in place establishing the authority of those who wrote it. On the other hand, most published academic sources go through a tedious process of vetting, proofreading, peer reviews, and editing, not to mention the credential expectations of everyone throughout that process. After hearing about that rigorous process used for published academic work, why would anyone trust Wikipedia, where the words you read could be written by an eight-year-old on summer vacation for all you know?

It all comes down to emergence.

One Outwitting Ox

One of my favorite podcasts did a story about emergence and the power of collective judgement and decision-making.

Radiolab's The Invisible Hand (2007)

 

In the story, there is a public contest involving an ox in a public square. People who entered the contest could win prizes if they were able to most closely guess the weight of the ox. Despite the large variety of the crowd who attempted to guess the ox's weight, none of them were able to accurately guess it.

After the contest was over, a curious character asked for all the guesses. This inquisitive individual was surprised to find out that the average of all the guesses was within one percent of the actual ox's weight, whereas none of the individual guesses came that close!

This surprising result led to further study of "wisdom of the crowd," resulting in the generalization that in many cases, the collective judgement of many diverse non-expert individuals is better than the judgement of a few expert individuals.

The "wisdom of the crowd" matches closely with the scientific & mathematical idea of emergence, where a large entity or system demonstrates complex behavior beyond the ability of the individual parts that make up the entity. In the ox example, each person is a poor judge of ox weight. However, all the people together make up a larger entity (the crowd) that is very good at judging ox weight. In that case, "the crowd" is the emergent behavior resulting from the aggregate of the individual people.

Lots of Little Leans vs. An Authoritative Arbiter: Why Wikipedia Won

Wikipedia is the emergent result of millions of volunteer editors. As mentioned earlier, Wikipedia does not require its volunteer editors to hold any credentials or be experts on what they are writing about. Each Wikipedia article has been pieced together from the collaboration of many non-experts. They all hold each other's work to a high standard, keeping Wikipedia trending towards higher-quality information. Compare this to traditional academic publishing, where the papers are largely controlled by their main author (or a very small set of authors). Wikipedia's diversity and breadth of contributors uniquely positions it as an authority of information, despite it being written almost entirely by individuals without credentials or authority.

This is not to say that you should always trust the crowd. Trusting individual experts is important too (which is why Wikipedia cites published academic papers).

But what the crowd has to say is worthy of being heard.

Take care of our internet treasure, Wikipedia.

 

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The Clunky Coda

There are a bunch of ideas about emergence that didn't quite fit into the main post, but it would be a shame to not mention:

The Radiolab story came from a fascinating larger episode all about emergence. In this episode, you'll learn more than you ever thought you wanted to know about what fireflies, ants, search engines, consciousness, termites, civilizations, and stock markets all have in common.

I would especially like to highlight from the Radiolab episode the connection between modern search engines and emergence. Google's success, both in beating other early search engines and internet directories, came from their innovation of treating links between pages as pseudo-endorsements. This democratized the page ranking process and allowed Google Search to grow with the rest of the internet.

The ox contest story originated with Francis Galton, who published the story with mathematical analysis in Nature in 1907.

I also had hoped to mention r/place, which, like Wikipedia, is a lovely internet treasure that could only occur because of the emergent behavior of millions of internet-humans.