Monday, May 12. 2008

Who posts geo-user generated content vs. who uses it?

Brady at O'Reilly describes the site update at Platial; here's Platial's blog post on it. (Theme: it's all about the map and user contributed content can be used as travel "guides." Very Shmappy, no?).

The tidbit that strikes me in Brady's post: "Secondly, the vast majority (>98%) of their traffic comes from browsers, people who don't contribute to the site, so why not make sure they can find what they need?" Those percentages of contributors vs. user seem to jibe with stats on how contributes to Wikipedia vs. who uses it: "But it's actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people. ... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits."

It's just something to think about when visiting these sites; the sample is small. It also makes me think about how mapping/GIS has been an oligarchy; specialists make the maps. Now, with Web 2.0 it's supposed to be democratized, but it's still an oligarchy.

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O'Reilly's inference that generally the information found on user maintained databases (I.E. Wikipedia... etc) is of low quality because the edits are only done by a narrow percentage of the users does not hold up for me.

The inference I got out of those numbers was that whole lot of people want to use the information but only a few are not too lazy to actually contribute their knowledge and improve the system.

So I ask myself, which would I more at ease using, information placed by lazy uninterested people or information from people that care enought to take the time to contribute?

#1 Thom Thumb on 2008-05-27 14:52 (Reply)

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