How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
Clay ShirkyRead
Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Wikipedia demonstrates the power of collective effort and contribution, contrasting it with how much time is wasted on advertisements.
This quote by Clay Shirky highlights the remarkable achievement of Wikipedia, which harnessed global volunteer efforts to create one of the most significant reference works in a short period. It emphasizes the contrast between productive collective tasks, like building Wikipedia, and the vast amounts of time people spend on less meaningful activities such as watching advertisements, provoking reflection on how we value our time and contributions.
Themes
WikipediaPeer ReviewVolunteerProductivityAdvertisement
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a presentation about the value of volunteering and collective efforts in modern technology.
More from Clay Shirky
All quotes →Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
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It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.
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What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.
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It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.
Clay ShirkyRead
If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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