Jun

17

Wales on Wikipedia (and Hayek)

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This month’s Reason has an interesting interview with Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, noting the influence of Hayek’s ideas on spontaneous order.
Wales’ latest venture, Wikia, is a service that allows users to set up their own wiki communities. The rules (or lack thereof) appear to be roughly the same as those of Wikipedia. I’m not sure [...]

Apr

28

Market Extent and Self-Selection

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In an earlier post (Peer-Production and the Extent of the Market), I had suggested that perhaps peer-production efforts did not necessarily represent a non-market phenomena, but may instead represent an adaptation to insufficient market extent. A weakness in that argument is the fact that market size is clearly not an issue for the notable peer-production [...]

Feb

14

Peer Production, Bias, and Competition

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By way of InstaPundit, here’s an interesting description of the struggle behind the scenes of a controversial Wikipedia page. The summary is provided by James Purtilo, a CS Professor at UMD College Park. He notes, in particular, one of the dangers when such material is frozen and not flagged with any sort of disclaimer:

When journalists [...]

Feb

8

Peer-Production and the Extent of the Market

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Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is coming up in my reading queue, so I recently went back and re-read his 2002 “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm”.
“Coase’s Penguin” is the paper in which Benkler coined the term peer-production to describe open-source software [...]