The wisdom of Oligarchies....is slowly being crowded out?

Very interesting article in Slate on refining the 90:9:1 rule of Social Media. There is a fascinating paper on the development of the Wikipedia contribution ecosystem referred to there.

Slate notes that, re digg and Wikipedia:

While both sites effectively function as oligarchies, they are still democratic in one important sense. Digg and Wikipedia's elite users aren't chosen by a corporate board of directors or by divine right. They're the people who participate the most. Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn't feasible at the scale on which these sites operate. Still, it's curious to note that these sites seem to have the hierarchical structure of the old-guard institutions they've sought to supplant.

This top-heavy structure of social-media sites isn't news to researchers and technophiles. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has acknowledged that what he expected to be an "80-20" rule—a system where 20 percent of people control 80 percent of the resources—in fact understates the site's top-heaviness.

Whereas for Slashdot..:

The moderation system at the tech blog Slashdot is perhaps the best example on the Web of a middle way. Slashdot, which draws on links submitted by readers, ordains active contributors with limited power to regulate comments and contributions from other users. Compared with Wikipedia, which requires supreme devotion from its smaller core of administrators, Slashdot makes it easy to become a moderator. Giving large numbers of people small chunks of responsibility has proven effective in eliminating trolls and flame wars in the comment section. Still, the authority any one moderator commands is small, and the site's official poobahs maintain control over which stories are featured at the top of the site. "These things are far from utopian," says founder Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco. "Slashdot tends to have a lot of 'Microsoft does something bad' stories. If I let the community run the whole thing, we'd have a lot more.

What is interesting though is that the Oligarchies are slowly becoming more democratic ( a trend we also suspect is happening in blogging ) - here for example is the chart from the paper for del.icio.us



The paper notes that:

A key difference between del.icio.us and Wikipedia is that the former does not promote direct interaction between users; instead, its power derives from the aggregation of many users’ individual data. As such it is an interesting contrast case to the high degree of interaction found in Wikipedia. We examined the distribution of work over time in del.icio.us as measured by the number of bookmarks added per user. As in the earlier analysis, users were split into classes based on their total number of bookmarks added. (The Figure above) shows the percentage of bookmarks made by different user classes. As in Wikipedia, we see a marked decline in the percentage of edits made by the highest-edit class from a high of 78% to a low of 27% in the latest data (June 2006). There is a corresponding rise in the lowest-edit class, from a low of 3% to the current high of 31%. Note that del.icio.us shows only a steady decline in the influence of elite users, with no initial rise as seen in Wikipedia. This is an intriguing difference that merits further study.