JOURNAL: The Rule of Five

From Mark Pesce's Hyperpeople blog:

Earlier this year, I was privileged to go “on tour” with Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, the founder and public face of Wikipedia, as we crisscrossed the nation, talking to educators in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. Everywhere we went, people asked the same question: why is Wikipedia such a success, while my wiki languishes? What do you need to achieve critical mass? The answer, Jimmy said, is five people. Five individuals dedicated to an altruistic sharing of collective intelligence should be enough to produce a flowering similar to Wikipedia. Jimbo has learned, through experience, that the “minor” language versions of Wikipedia (languages with less than 10 million native speakers), need at least five steady contributors to become self-sustaining. In the many wikis Jimbo oversees through his commercial arm, Wikia, he’s noted the same phenomenon time and again. Five people mark the tipping point between a hobby and a nascent hyperintelligence.

I suspect this observation applies to a much wider array of networked activity than just wikis...

Comments

[JHyde]

I'm not sure if this tells the whole story. Most networked communities follow a power-law curve, with a few people doing a majority of the work. You need five of these kind of people, but you also can't do it without the long tail of many many other people who each do a tiny amount of the work. I've always liked 42 Entertainment's audience model, with it's three levels
http://www.42entertainment.com/see.html
You can't do it without the very active core but you also can't do it without not very active periphery.

[P-]

Did anybody catch the 2 words that Senator Kit Bond used in the national assessment hearings? And i'm not refering to orange-jump suits. Which is telling in and of itself.