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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 61
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Products
Process
Article
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More quotes by Clay Shirky

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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
Clay Shirky
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Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.
Clay Shirky
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To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.
Clay Shirky
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Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
Clay Shirky
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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
Clay Shirky
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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
Clay Shirky
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Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
Clay Shirky
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
Clay Shirky
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There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
Clay Shirky
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
Clay Shirky
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
Clay Shirky
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
Clay Shirky
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
Clay Shirky
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So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
Clay Shirky
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Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
Clay Shirky
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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
Clay Shirky
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It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.
Clay Shirky
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The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.
Clay Shirky
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The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?
Clay Shirky
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Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.
Clay Shirky