the culture of efficiency

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7 Responses

  1. enteringthewhirlpool says:

    Congratulations. Loving the little dog on the cover.

    Two questions:

    1) Is Wikipedia more or less efficient than paper encyclopedias? I would wager more efficient in terms of usage/labour input due to the much larger number of users. Effort is lost due to people disputing what content should be present, incrementally changing, shifting and adding content, but maybe this is part of the Wikipedia product. Of course, it would be more efficient if one person wrote each article, the article could not be edited, and he wrote exactly what would be written collaboratively but….. this is impossible for any one person to do.

    2) Altering a wikipedia page would have positive expected externalities wouldn’t it? In which case we could expect a lower than efficient rate of edits…..

  2. nathanjurgenson says:

    1-correct, that is what is being argued, that it is less efficient for many people to write one entry, but can be more effective. the effort being lost is less efficient rather than more. perhaps you are defining efficiency in some way other than i did in the post? ~nathan

  3. kiyallsmith says:

    Congratulations on the publication!

    I am especially interested in the idea of effectiveness–but who is it effective for–prosumers, users, “content owners,” site owners, or some other entity?

    Keri

  4. philipsmith says:

    I am delighted to hear that you have been published. That is awesome news!

  1. 21st September 2009

    […] doing free labor on a scale unimaginable to previous generations.  Put simply, prosumption is more efficient.(also, see this previous post)  By efficiency, I do not mean that more quality/quantity of unique […]

  2. 28th January 2010

    […] written many posts on this blog about the implosion of the spheres of production and consumption indicating the rise of […]

  3. 3rd March 2010

    […] human input. Web 2.0, alternatively, is not centered on the efficient production of content [I've made this argument previously]. User-generated content is, instead, produced by many individuals, making it much less predictable […]

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