One idea that is discussed in “Here Comes Everybody” that I really like is the idea of collective action. This idea is that people share things and as people share things that can lead to cooperation. You can have people come together and work on a common problem just by sharing what they know or what they are passionate about. An example is the first blog post discussing the missing phone but the perfect example of collective action has to be Wikipedia.
The simple idea behind Wikipedia is that anybody can go in and create a page for a topic or edit an existing page. You basically get a chance to show what you know to millions of people that will visit that Wikipedia page. Submitting something to Wikipedia and seeing it every time you visit a page makes you feel like you have accomplished something. And that is the basic idea behind collective action. It’s people coming together and sharing what they know which turns into a good finished project. There is no way one person or even a team of people could create anything like Wikipedia. You need the help of everybody coming together and simply just telling what they know and provide something that backs that up.
Another thing with collective action is that it doesn’t ask too much from the people that are helping cooperate. You really only have to do one small thing and then you are done. With Wikipedia you just have to go to find something that you know and put it into the article for that topic. It’s simple to do and you feel good because you are helping to an overall completion of a project.
There are some issues with collective action but Wikipedia seems to bypass most of them. One of the issues is people who are just freeloading. It always happens when you have to do a group project, there is always one person who refuses to do any work or will do the least amount of work and stick their name on the project. With Wikipedia the people who are freeloading are people who don’t edit any pages or help with the upkeep of the website. But the number of people who do edit the pages and try to improve the website is so high that it doesn’t really matter that people like me go on Wikipedia almost everyday and never edit anything or add anything to a page.
Another issue facing collective action is that some individuals will purposely harm a collective action effort. This is probably Wikipedia’s biggest fear when it comes to harming the collective action they have going. Since anybody can go on a page and write whatever they want it can lead to people reading wrong or misleading information. Wikipedia has gotten good at catching these errors and you also have the users policing the pages, but you still run the risk of reading false or wrong information, especially when you look up some of the more obscure topics. This has potential harm to people like me who use Wikipedia when doing school reports and such. But every collective action is subject to these issues and Wikipedia seems to handle them very well.
Wikipedia is THE perfect example of a collective action. Just a bunch of users coming to a common cause to make Wikipedia one of the best and most useful websites on the Internet, there really is no better example that has such a large impact on something as large as the Internet. Have I mentioned I love Wikipedia?
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