Swarm Creativity Blog

The more active Wikipedia Editors a country has, the better is the health of it's economy! Different national cultures are reflected in Wikipedia editor behavior. In a hierarchical culture like Japan, there are a few senior Wikipedia editors who keep a tight rein on who is allowed to edit articles. In a more egalitarian culture like Sweden, a much higher percentage of active Wikipedia editors obtain the coveted Wikipedia Admin status. In this project we find a relationship between intrasocial capital of countries and the structure of the Wikipedias of the matching European languages. In the context of the current economic crisis we compare success of an economy with the Wikipedia editor behavior of the corresponding country. The German, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Greek, Swedish, and Finnish languages are predominantly spoken in just the mother country, allowing for a one-to-one mapping between Wikipedia in that language and economy of the mother country. We obtained differ...

Based on earlier work analyzing and visualizing the hidden links in Wikipedia, we have added a new dynamic Wikipedia mapping function to Condor. The new Wiki-Evolution feature collects all links originating and/or pointing to one or more Wikipedia articles over a given time period. Today I used this feature, to see what the Wikipedians have to say about Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich . The picture below shows the bidirectional link network of the most important articles about the two contenders for RepublicanUS presidential candidate. The nodes are colored by actuality (the more edits they have in the last 14 days, the darker the red. (0 to 20 edits is grey, 21 to 50 edits is orange, over 50 edits is dark red). As we can see, the articles about the two candidates have attracted the most edits, but also the rock group LMFAO (whose singer SkyBlu was involved in an altercation in a plane with Romney in 2010), Pope John Paul II (who shares the distinction with Gingrich of having been chos...

Coolhunt Log #10 Friday, April 27, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, Professor of Internet Public Relations at Tulane University Rachelle Matherne, moderator MODERATOR: I'd like to remind everyone of the rules of the Coolhunt. We do at least one site review, one blog post, one comment on another blog, and try to make one personal connection via email or phone. Speakers, please introduce yourselves and tell us where you are dialing in from. SCOTT: Today, I'm calling from the Engineering Systems Division at MIT. STEVE: I'm here in my role as Tulane University professor, calling in from my home office in New Orleans, Louisiana. SCOTT: Part of the preparation for doing this daily call has resulted in finding some interesting things on the web. The weirdest thing I've seen lately was a blog by Alyssa Milano on the L.A. Dodgers. Apparently, she blogs every day for Go Blue, and she seems...

Coolhunt Log #7 Tuesday, April 24, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor. PETER: There was a New York Times article yesterday documenting Wikipedia's coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. I find the article really inspiring. WEB: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/technology/23link.html The story begins: IMAGINE a newspaper with more than 2,000 writers, researchers and copy editors, yet no supervisors or managers to speak of. No deadlines; no meetings to plan coverage; no decisions handed down through a chain of command; no getting up on a desk to lead a toast after a job well done. PETER: Further down in the article, there is a quote: "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work." Let's now move...

I stumbled into this NYT article about Danny Hillis – of Thinking Machines fame – latest startup, Metaweb Technologies. His goal is to create Freebase, a database that will describe things “how they are”. He wants, for example, to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger with different views as a bodybuilder, a movie actor, and a politician. I am wondering if the approach of having a centralized system to describe "things how they are" will ever work. The point is that the same things can have very different meanings for different people. I just think back to the only time I visited East Berlin before the wall came down. I went to a bookstore and looked at schoolbooks talking about the second world war. The books were telling how the great and wonderful Soviet Union liberated Germany from the Nazi dictatorship. The US was barely mentioned. In the meantime I have been in now unified Berlin many times. But I can not find these books anymore in the regular bookstores. The point is that ...