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Ball, P. (2007, February 27). The more, the wikier. Nature: International weekly journal of Science. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com The More, The Wikier is an article published on Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science, which explores the secret behind the quality of Wikipedia entries when anyone, anywhere has the ability to write and edit content. The article looks at three groups of researchers who "claim to have untangled the process by which many Wikipedia entries achieve their impressive accuracy". Wikipedia is an organisation in which users collaborate their knowledge to create an encyclopedia of information. "The percentage of edits made by the Wikipedia 'élite' of administrators" is steadily declining and "Wikipedia is now dominated by users who are much more numerous than the elite but individually less active." "The wisdom of the crowds" principle suggests that the combined knowledge of a large and diverse group is superior to the knowledge of a few experts. Ball explains that content accuracy and quality of Wikipedia articles is related to a high number of edits by a large number of users. For example, articles that deal with very topical issues receive a higher level of attention from a large and diverse audience and therefore are of higher quality than articles that are not as topical and thus do not attract the same attention. The three research groups referenced in the article are: Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman of Hewlett Packard's research laboratories who studied how a high number of edits by a large number of users create the 'best' Wikipedia articles, Aniket Kittur of the University of California, and co-workers who explored how the Wiki community has evolved from a small governing group to a democracy, and Ofer Arazy and colleagues at the University of Alberta who discuss the importance of this diversification of Wikipedia contributors to the overall success of its articles.

This article takes a look at the crowd sourcing idea that Wikipedia thrives on. 'Lots of edits by lots of people'. Crowd sourcing makes use of the knowledge of crowds. The more people you have contributing information to an article the more information the article will contain. This is however affected when fewer people begin to contribute to the writing and collaboration process. A person contributing to the Wikipedia page may only be making a change as small as a simple grammatical correction but it means quite a lot to the overall aesthetic of the page. People are far less likely to believe the information presented by an article filled with errors and punctuation problems. It might seem like a small issue but this is how many hands make light work. Wikipedia's reliability comes from its ability to be edited by many people with small alterations. It is strange however that in your other article regarding Wikipedia being its own worst enemy you have points made there of why Wikipedia is leaning towards extinction. These mainly are concerned with the decreasing number of people editing. So is Wikipedia going to stay strong or will it slowly become just another encyclopedia?

Ball's article highlights the successful nature of Wikipedia's open source network and how quality of information is achieved. He suggests that the 'secret' to Wikipedia's credibility is the increasing number of contributors and the 'diversification' it brings to the platform through collective knowledge (Ball, 2007). I can relate Ball's article to Surowiecki's (2004) article Wisdom of the Crowds because it reinforces the notion that people must be unrelated, independent, and have diversity of mind from one another to form good opinions. The architecture of the collaborative platform Wikipedia harnesses the 'power of the crowds' in such a way that encourages diverse participation, as opposed to a group-think scenario, and thus produces 'wisdom' through quality information (Surowiecki, 2004, p5). Ball observes that Wikipedia's structure allows for an above average quality of information on more topical articles. This occurs because popular topics create more traffic, which in turn enables more contributors to edit an article and therefore creating more 'diverse' and 'reliable' information (Ball, 2007). This reinforces the quality of an article through diversification and mass collaboration. This notion of 'quality' can be applied to the Kony 2012 campaign page on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kony_2012), which has been edited over 500 times and has been viewed 1,227,982 times since 6 March 2012, when the Kony 2012 campaign was first launched (Wikipedia Article Page Statistics, 2012). However, it is at this point that the similarities between Ball and Surowiecki cease. According to Ball, the Kony 2012 Wikipedia article is a prime example of a topical issue. The statistics reinforce his observations about Wikipedia's crowds and how they are able to create credible and reliable information due to diversification brought into the article by 1,227,98

Kittur, A., & Kraut, R. (2008). Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds in Wikipedia: Quality Through Coordination. Carnegie Mellon University. Retrieved 2012, March 19th from http://kraut.hciresearch.org/sites/kraut.hciresearch.org/files/articles/Kittur08-WikipediaWisdomOfCrowds_CSCWsubmitted.pdf Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds in Wikipedia: Quality Through Coordination is a study that looks into "the critical importance of coordination in effectively harnessing the "wisdom of the crowds" in online production environments". The article suggests that Wikipedia's success is reliant on significant and varied coordination from its users and not just determined by a large and diverse author-base as proposed in other studies (Arazy, Morgan, Ofer, Patterson, Raymond & Wayne, 2006). Elements such as editor(s) coordination methods, article lifecycle, and task interdependence determine whether a large author-base will be effective or counteractive in achieving high Wikipedia entry quality. The study found that unspoken expectations and a shared understanding (implicit coordination) between authors encouraged positive results when collaborating with a large author-base however more editors promoted a negative effect on article quality when using direct communication and verbal planning (explicit coordination). During the early stages of article development, both implicit and explicit coordination tend to promote content quality because author(s) need to establish structure, direction and scope of the article. For these high-coordination tasks, the study found it was more beneficial to have a small or core group of editors to set direction and as the article became more established, value can be maximized by distributing low-coordination tasks, such as fixing grammar, correcting vandalism and creating links, to a larger author-base.

This paper discusses the how online community can increase the size and quality of Wikipedia's article. In Wikipedia 40% of edits have done with the help of discussion page, which they focus on development of policies and procedures, communication and consensus building. Most of the editors read discussion page to know how they can increase the quality of the articles (Kittur & Kraut, n.d). According to my own studies, the most exiting research on Wikipedia belongs on how many times an article needs to have the highest quality? And why some articles have high level of quality and others not? Some contributors like to read and edit articles with similar subject and they do not edit other articles. So, Wikipedia, needs some soft wares to ask contributors' the duties they should do. For example, one article needs more reference link and another one needs more grammar correcting and of course, there are some people who their interest is finding relevant links or there are some others who like to correct grammatical mistake and they just need to know which article needs their help, so, these kind of soft wares can assert to contributors needs of articles and help of contributors Wikipedia can have equal level of quality for its articles (Ram, 2010). Ram, S. (2010). Who does what on Wikipedia? Available on http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1832403/who_does_what_on_wikipedia/