Wikipedia Labors

FT.com | The Undercover Economist | Is that a big number? - Wikipedia edition: "Clay Shirky reports on a conversation with a TV producer, after describing a flurry of activity on the Pluto page:

She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

100 million hours sounds like a big number, but as Clay goes on to describe, it’s tiny. 100 million hours is about 20 minutes per US citizen - roughly the amount of time collectively spent watching advertisements in a typical weekend. (That’s Clay’s number: I’d have guess it only took"