1. The “power law distribution” or “long tail” phenomenon, as seen in behavior online on the Wikipedia, suggests that the concept of an average user of wikipedia is meaningless. Support your answer: how do you think a local, “JMU only” version of the Wikipedia would compare to the worldwide version? Would it be very similar? Higher quality? Less quality? Why?
Wikipedia is worldwide and has a wide range of diversity. JMU honestly does not have that. The only similarities is that all of JMU would have their ideas and facts that they want to put on their. Many people would continue to pile on information about a subject or topic. How the two would differ, a JMU only version lacks size in comparison and would not have the same ammount of contribution. There a small age range of contributors unless alumni can be a part of the JMU only version. I think that would help. There are a lot of intelligent people who know there stuff here at JMU but I think the quality would be lower because who is checking the credibility of what is put on there? and I believe we would be a little biased depending on our views of what we put on our version.
Good point on bias - I don't recall where Shirky articulates this in the book - but he does mention the value in diversity and the fact that some groups by definition are not diverse because they form because folks have common interests.
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