mythical wisdom of wiki crowds

Sometimes I wonder how much of an echo chamber we're in.  "Because the World is Flat, the Wisdom of Crowds is producing so much content in the Long Tail that we're reaching a Tipping Point.  I now demonstrate this with my slide of deliFlickrTubeAmazooglePediaSpace."

I'm particularly wary of this idea that you can just stick something up and the Wisdom of Crowds will start generating content for you.  Wikipedia is presented as if the crowd just freely contributes equally, whereas in reality, there is a relatively small number of contributors with a quite elaborate policy and management structure.

I found How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko to be very informative.

DR: What about the 'collective intelligence' or 'collective wisdom' argument: That given enough authors, the quality of an article will generally improve? Does this hold true for Wikipedia?

EB: No, it does not. The best articles are typically written by a single or a few authors with expertise in the topic. In this respect, Wikipedia is not different from classical encyclopedias.

KN: Elian is right. Also, most of the short articles remain short and of rather poor content.

via Slashdot - Interview Looks at How and Why Wikipedia Works /.

LibraryStuff also had some interesting info today,

in Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, "1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content..."