Simon DeDeo (Santa Fe Institute)
Abstract. Wikipedia is remarkable as an information source: its technical accuracy rivals (and its scope far exceeds) that of the century-old Encyclopedia Britannica. It is remarkable also as an example of a self-organizing gift economy with very little top-down control. In this brief talk, I consider the evolution of this system at the finest-grained level: the tens of thousands of "edits" made by users that lead, over a ten-year timespan, to the construction of the system we know today. I demonstrate the emergence of "micronorms": runs of highly cooperative behavior that last from minutes to hours, and describe some of the properties of this evanescent phenomenon. Finally (as time permits), I present evidence for large scale "phases" of collective behavior that seem to persist independently of top-down administrative control.