Former SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo describes his research to find and explain patterns of human social behavior in data from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Listen to the interview on the Santa Fe Radio Café (49 minutes, November 4, 2013)
In a relatively short time, just 12 years, he says, Wikipedia has become a high functioning, self organized social system with rules and norms and a comprehensive edit history. Thus, it serves as an attractive sandbox for scientists trying to understand human social behavior at a theoretic level.
“If we had a scientific explanation of why Wikipedia functions as well as it does, we would be much further along, I think, in our evolution as a social species,” he says.