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.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Wikipedia is a waste of time. But compare it to television:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
that much tv makes me sick. I'm glad we still don't have one.
100 million hours a weekend on ads.
btw I'm going to blatently steal your reference for my blog... I'll be sure to give you credit for finding it though :-)
That all seemed pretty sound. I just read 'Rainbows End' which considers a similar suture outlook where huge group participation project are the norm.
Post a Comment