Slate on Wikipedia and Digg
Submitted by Susannaleers on Wed, 2008-02-27 16:41.
Slate has an interesting article titled "Digg, Wikipedia and the Myth of Web 2.0 Democracy" in which the author, Chris Wilson, talks about how a few people are responsible for most of the entries in Digg and Wikipedia and various permutations of having an open-access site. He makes that point that "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."
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An interesting read. Tons of people submit entries to digg but the ones that make it to the front page are controlled by a select few users. There are even rumours of people paying top users to submit their sites. Definately not a democratic process . As for Wikipedia, I wonder what it would look like if entries were not standardized and edited?
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