Collaboration and collective efforts are often confused by those not familiar with both terms, but they are not similar and they are two distinctly different efforts. Collaboration is people working together (often with a common goal) to build one thing (think wiki page with one understanding). Collective efforts are the aggregation of people's individual efforts, sometimes in the same service, but do not have common goal or common effort (del.icio.us page for a URL is the collective understanding of individuals tagging of that page for their own use.He's tried to describe this difference in Wikipedia's entry on Folksonomy, but it keeps getting changed back and he receives nastygrams about it. Now that's collaborative.
Wikipedia Folksonomy is a Mess with Collaborative Misunderstanding :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net
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Without knowing all the details, I would guess that the reason his distinction between “collective” and “collaborative” keeps getting removed from the folksonomies page is that Wikipedia users would consider it to be original research.
ReplyDeleteMaybe so. I think it's interesting that he can't win an argument with the Wikipedia community, so he chooses to make the argument on his blog instead.
ReplyDeleteI'm writing an article and wanted to check on the usage of the phrase "collectively collaborate" and found this. Funny.
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