Clive Thompson: “collaboration has a long history in art. Plays are frequently infected with ideas that came from actors or even sound engineers. Some Shakespeare scholars wonder whether some of the Bard's lines came from onstage improvisations by actors. And though many of today's writers and creators would never admit it, editing by committee can rescue an overindulgent work. Collaboration is old hat.”
Thompson mentions a book (okay, one of the books) I'm currently reading, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki (notes forthcoming), and examines the phenomenon of Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia project suggesting that crowds can be creative as well as excellent decision-makers and predictors and resources of knowledge.
Jonathan Delacour also explored Wikipedia and had an epiphany about wikis: “there’s something about the wiki way of tracking a conversation that I find more appealing: it feels more natural to store the conversation in one location (rather than having identical copies in each participants Gmail account); and, now that I’m converted, the ability to edit the entries (and roll back to previous versions) seems essential.”
