The “power law distribution” or “long tail” phenomenon, as seen in behavior online on the Wikipedia, suggests that the concept of an average user of wikipedia is meaningless. Support your answer: how do you think a local, “JMU only” version of the Wikipedia would compare to the worldwide version? Would it be very similar? Higher quality? Less quality? Why?
I think the idea of a 'JMU only' version of wikipedia is an interesting idea. Although I don't think the knowledge would be as extensive as sites that are open to the world, the JMU site would hold great information that students could create, access, and comment on. The topics on the site would be much more focused to JMU events, current events and local news but I think it would be a great resource for people to have in the Harrisonburg community. And, just because the topics will not have such a range, it does not mean that the quality of the JMU site would be any less. In fact, JMU's site may even have a higher knowledge of certain topics compared to Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, people can completely fabricate topics, information and news, but at JMU I would hope that most of what people post is truthful. In Shirky's article, he discusses the power law distribution. "the gap between the first and second position is larger than the gap between second and third, and so on." - page 125. This theory would definitely hold true if JMU were to have a wikipedia-type site, yet it may not be as visible because there would probably not be the 'n-th' degree of users. At most, maybe 2 or 3 people would probably edit a particular topic, in which the theory could be visible but not as clear as a site like Wikipedia.
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