True. I think that Wikipedia should generate more revenue via ads, in order to be able to do more stuff.
Interesting. However, one would also like to know the causes of why Wikipedia's leadership started to behave in this way. One possible explanation is that they didn't have enough monetary incentives. If they would have had stronger incentives to keep the number of revisions growing they would have implemented policies that made sure that happened. I think there could be something to that - that if Google's Knobe had outcompeted Wikipedia, it wouldn't have had the same problems, because it would have been more rationally governed.
When Wikipedia was new, there was much entusiasm over it's not-for-profit model. Recent years have seen a steady decline in the number of users, though. Meanwhile, companies such as Google and Amazon grow ever larger and are, arguably, besides making huge profits contributing to the growth of human knowledge and prosperity on a massive scale.
An important question in this regard is to what extent information should be generated and controlled by not-for-profits such as Wikipedia (or even the government) or by for-profit entities. What are the advantages and disadvantages of these different systems? To some extent they are the same as for any other economic activity, but producing and organizing information are of... (read 670 more words →)
Thanks, that's very interesting. I was especially interested in this:
We can gauge each Superuser’s voting accuracy based on their performance on honeypots (proposed updates with known answers which are deliberately inserted into the updates queue). Measuring performance and using these probabilities correctly is the key to how we assign points to a Superuser’s vote.
So they measure voting accuracy based on some questions on which they know the true answer.
There is a difference between their votes and the kind of votes cast here, though; namely that on Less Wrong there is not in a strict sense a "true answer" to how good a post or comment is. So that tactics cannot be used.
On questions on which there is a true answer it is easier to track people's reliability and provide them with incentives to answer reliably. On questions which are more an issue of preference ("e.g. how good is this post?") that is harder.
Interesting, and an interesting Slashdot link. I especially like the idea of "moderating the moderators". You do need to check whether people vote seriously in some way, it seems to me.
The only problem I see is Richard's concern below that multi-criterial systems, where you actually vote on all criteria, may turn out to be too cumbersome to use.
If everyone had identical criteria for voting, we would see all postings having either large positive karma, karma near zero, or large negative karma. The more alike people are in their judgements, the less information the total score provides.
If you only can give 1 plus vote, 1 negative vote, or no vote at all, that seems to follow. If you rather could give, say 1-5 positive or negative Karma, we would see a greater variety of scores.
Also, note that many posts and especially comments have very few votes. This means that the votes actually cast will often not be typical of the whole population of possible voters in a system where people's... (read more)
The Karma system is better than nothing, and also better than even simpler systems as Facebook's like system, but the main problem is that it is too simple.
Presumably the Karma system is supposed to at least do two things:
1) Influence posters' behaviour (e.g. if you get downvoted when writing in a certain way you're likely to change)
2) Inform readers which posts and comments to read
However, it does not perform these tasks very efficiently, the reason being that it is so very unclear what we are voting on. People apply wildly different criteria. For instance, I would guess that some have a much lower threshold for throwing a downvote than... (read more)
Good question. It is true that not-for-profits and the government have a lot in common. Most importantly, they're both supposed to work directly for the public good (rather than for their own profits). There are some important differences, though:
1) Not-for-profits do not have monopoly on violence. (Most of the below follow from that.) 2) People do not have the same sense of entitlement visavi not-for-profits 3) You normally can create more of a "community spirit" within a not-for-profit. In governmental organizations, users have more of a tendency to view the leadership as "parents" to whom one goes to request more stuff. People take more responsibility in not-for-profits, especially small ones (this is closely related... (read more)