The world according to Wikipedia

Jun 262012
 
 June 26, 2012

This map shows all the locations that have been written about in Wikipedia, in English articles. 

The data has been gathered by a collaboration between Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and TraceMedia who provided the interface to view it through.

On his blog, Dr Mark Graham says “If your primary source of information about the world is the Persian, Arabic or Hebrew version of Wikipedia, then it looks very different than if viewing it through the English version.  There are very more absences – and many parts of the world don’t exist at all!”

Map of Europe proportional to the number of English articles… 

Map of Europe proportional to the number of French articles… 

Finally, a map created from the Wikipedia data proportionate to the number of pictures (photos) taken for English articles (all 700,000 plus of them!)

Link to site: http://bit.ly/mappingwikipedia

The Wisdom of the Digital Crowd

Dec 092011
 
 December 9, 2011

The wisdom of the crowd refers to the process of taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert to answer a question.

When you integrate this theory with the power of Web 2.0 capability, what do you get?

Well, James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds would suggest a potent power on tap, and all you would have to do is ask the question….

So are we availing of this unlimited knowledge?  I hope so, but how do you protect against collective misrepresentation?

Look at Wikipedia.  It’s an obvious example of this collective knowledge, pouring wisdom into surfers with seemingly infinite pages of data held on it’s servers, but can we trust this information to be ‘wise’?

In the main yes, but don’t forget that I could change that, albeit momentarily, all I’d have to do is login…

So whereas the input from many thousands of good and well meaning people are harnessed in the archives of Wiki-databases, you still need to take your references/data from more than one source to protect against either malicious or unintentional errors that may get amplified by that very same momentum.

It’s not the (digital) medium that may be the weak link here, it’s communal power of the very same people in the crowd who may, just may, be wrong!

I do believe  in the wisdom of crowds though, I do. Really.