Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and the orginzational principles of consensus.

If the newspapers and websites aren't cutting it for you, I've found that Wikipedia often has amazingly comprehensive articles about on going issues. Global Financial Crisis of 2008 is Wikipedia's good history of what's been happening to the financial markets recently. It is divided in weeks, giving the details that emerged that week, as well as government reactions at the time. For a larger overview, check out the Wikipedia entry for the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 Also, the chart on this page on CNBC is giving a running total of the cost of all parts of the bailout. Right now it's at $7.9 trillion, for the U.S. Government.

Click below to read my thoughts on the new form of consensus building via Wikipedia, and the social science possibilities of studying a fully archived conversation that leads to consensus.

I really enjoy how a semi-consensus, or more accurately a consensus of the participating, view is emerging using Wikipedia as a medium of consensus building. There is a large difference between this type of consensus and the Green Party's version. With the GP, consensus must be reached to act, and anyone can hold anything back. With the Wikipedia model, everyone is empowered to act, and a only critical mass of participation stops the entire project from becoming unmaintainable.

I wonder if anyone has done any studies on the organizational principles behind the contributors of Wikipedia for fast growing articles like the ones linked to above. I found This 10 page PDF from IBM about the Featured Article process, which is pretty meta-level, compared to the writing of an article from scratch or stub. Found that via Google, which had a feature I'd never used before. When you click on "Cited by 16" it brings you to scholar.google.com. I'm going to have to loose myself in there someday...

Anyway, It would make for an interesting subject to study, as most people participating would be able to be interviewed via email, if the questions were short enough. Most subjects would like the fact that the organizational structure of their own making was being studied. Also, the talk pages are full of their reasoning at the time.

Also, since everything is archived, you could look back into articles that fit into a "healthly" or "unhealthly" structure. I mean, it might be interesting to see stories like the Financial Crisis, which takes a high level of expertise to really fully understand, but it being covered very consistently by broadcast media, compared to something which is very controversial, like the future inauguration of Barack Obama, which is sure to have it's own page because of "noteworthiness". Or, from things that differ mainly by media coverage or scale. Wikirage.com has a few contemporary choices, like The Mubai attacks vs the Jos Riots vs the Thai Political Crisis.

The possibilities are astounding. My mind jumps right away to the idea of a natural language processing system, and how Wikipedia is not only an amazing source for building a semantic web, but also for understanding the principles of group social dynamics in humans. Too bad I'll have to wait another 10-15 years for Natural Language Processing is mature enough to handle it, Star Trek fashion.