Information diet
A wiki gets people to look WIDER. This means more mixing and less filter bubbles.
Diet
There's a really interesting book by Henry Hobhouse called "Seeds of Change", about some plants that have deeply influenced human history. One is sugar, and like in Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me", he points to a particular problem with it;
- Sugars go directly into your bloodstream and are the body's way of telling you you're full up.
So when you eat too much of it, the other stuff you might be eating too, the stuff with proteins, vitamins & nutrients in it, gets disproportionately stored as fat or excreted as waste. In extreme cases it can apparently result in a sort of sugar-induced malnutrition.
This suggests that in addition to poor exercise, comfort eating etc, there's another positive feedback at work in obesity - the more sugar in your diet, the more food you have to eat to get enough of the things you actually need. And if the stuff you're eating doesn't change, that of course means more sugar, which means even more food, etc, etc. In Spurlock's case, it was the massive fizzy drinks he got with all his fast food that were tipping him onto this slippery slope.
So increasing the quality of what you eat might sometimes be more effective than trying to control the quantity. I suppose that's how the Atkin's diet works.
Information
Perhaps information has a similar quality/quantity problem. The internet definitely has something of the sugar-induced obesity/malnutrition about it.
Google, for example, finds millions, if not billions, of hits for a given search, but the vast majority of the click traffic doesn't make it past the first few results. By the second page, the results might as well be invisible. After a few pages it seems to be largely repetitive machine generated copies of what was above it anyway. So those first few results have got to be the "right" ones, which means they quickly converge on the "sugary" lowest common denominator.
To get over this, Google tries to personalise your results, and you refine your search or rely on habit and social media, but you're soon sucked into Filter bubbles, where a similar problem emerges again in a different direction.
It's not necessarily that a long tail full of amazing, diverse things doesn't exist, it's just that it can be hard work to explore (which incidentally acts as a bit of a deterrent to making amazing, diverse things - a negative negative feedback).
Quality
Things like "quality" are notoriously hard to measure, so diet, ecology etc studies often use diversity instead. A diverse ecosystem is a high quality one. A diverse diet is a healthy one.
There are different approaches, from simple measures like the number of categories (e.g. species richness), through the relative abundance in different categories, to really complex systems where different categories are given different levels of sensitivity and importance [1].
You could measure information diet/diversity in a very similar way -
- how much is user click traffic penetrating into the long tail?
This integrates over all the complications that normal diversity estimates have to deal with -
- the diversity of click pathways available
- the extent to which users are passive recipients or active contributors
- the breadth and depth of the information a site (for example) contains etc
Quantifying diversity
It's not hard to do this for information -
- count clicks on each page (maybe for different types of click, or over certain periods)
- divide them all by the highest number of clicks in that list
- sort the results from high to low
- plot them and compare the trends you get with other curves
- you can fit curves and compare their exponents etc
For example, the graph on the right shows some results for this wiki.
Unsurprisingly, you can see that wiki traffic penetrates deeper than the general Google curve and that the Related Pages etc sections help traffic penetrate even further.
What all this suggests is that information diets, as far as diversity goes anyway, might benefit from a bit of wikification, perhaps with knock-on effects for general information and knowledge health.
