However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can
tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try
to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
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. [...] 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. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is
This gives me a new perspective on human insanity, or more positively, on how much relatively low-hanging fruit is out there.
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.
This seems ridiculously low. That’s an average of less than one minute per person worldwide.
-- Clay Shirky
From the same page:
This gives me a new perspective on human insanity, or more positively, on how much relatively low-hanging fruit is out there.
This seems ridiculously low. That’s an average of less than one minute per person worldwide.
Most people don’t contribute to Wikipedia.
I think I’ve spent about a minute contributing to Wikipedia—and I’m one of those rare humans with access to a computer and clean water.
EDIT: Wait, including talk pages… probably several minutes.