The Wiki Story - Response #3

Question: I don't really know if this serves as the question you're looking for but I could not understand the statement "...but today those objections have taken on the flavor of the apocryphal farmer beholding his first giraffe and exclaiming,'Ain't no such animal!" (pg 117).

I found this reading very interesting in the fact that the success of the Wikipedia trumped the more legitimate Nupedia. Because the creation of Nupedia was so in depth and needed a full force of effort behind it, it had trouble surviving. As soon as Sanger and Wales tested the wiki project, it was immediately receiving more feedback than the Nupedia ever had. The fact that the public found it more accessible, and were actually interested in helping to build the amount of entries in Wikipedia reminds me of the previous reading involving "amateurization" versus professionalism. Does this situation with the wiki being more successful play into the fact that more and more amateurs seem to be participating in actions that used to be left to the professionals? I also question why the public wouldn't prefer to rely on a more reliable source such as Nupedia, as opposed to a website with user-generated content. I thought it was interesting to read about the reasons why people would even be interested in putting their own personal knowledge about something into a page online, for others to learn from. I liked to read that one of the reasons that people take the time to make entries is based on their desire to do a good thing. I think that the part in the book that describes the Ultimatum game. It is odd to think that it is human nature to "have a willingness to punish those who are treating us unfairly" (Shirky 134). It is interesting to think about choosing between getting nothing or getting a little and having to deal with the other person getting more than you. In the article about collective intelligence, I find it interesting that it notes on how higher education institutions push students to use more scholarly sources. The article focuses on the importance of collective intelligence and being open to "that there are diverse forms of expertise and that we learn more if we draw on as many different minds as possible rather than placing our trust in singular minds" (Jenkins, "Sharing Notes about Collective Intelligence"). I wonder if schools will ever make the shift from scholarly input to a more collective source of intelligence.