How collective intelligence emerges: Knowledge creation process in Wikipedia from microscopic viewpoint

Abstract

The Wikipedia, one of the richest human knowledge repositories on the Internet, has been developed by collective intelligence. To gain insight into Wikipedia, one asks how initial ideas emerge and develop to become a concrete article through the online collaborative process? Led by this question, the author performed a microscopic observation of the knowledge creation process on the recent article, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The author collected not only the revision history of the article but also investigated interactions between collaborators by making a user-paragraph network to reveal an intellectual intervention of multiple authors. The knowledge creation process on the Wikipedia article was categorized into 4 major steps and 6 phases from the beginning to the intellectual balance point where only revisions were made. To represent this phenomenon, the author developed a visaphor (digital visual metaphor) to digitally represent the article's evolving concepts and characteristics. Then the author created a dynamic digital information visualization using particle effects and network graph structures. The visaphor reveals the interaction between users and their collaborative efforts as they created and revised paragraphs and debated aspects of the article.