I wonder if that sort of thing should be added to the list of biases—it’s being so influenced by the most prominent example that one no longer perceives the range of possibility. It seems something like framing, but not exactly it.
I don’t know if that’s quite what’s happening here. It’s probably more that Wikipedia (and maybe a few other heavily Wikipedia-inspired, MediaWiki-based sites) is the only exposure most people will have to the wiki concept. The range of possibility didn’t exist in their minds in the first place.
I’m not sure if the effect whereby it skews people’s expectations of other later-discovered wikis is something like a qualitative rather than numeric version of anchoring (is there any research on that? Does it have a name?), or if it’s just an unsurprising and possibly rational result of people originally seeing “wiki” associated with a single site and not a larger category. If a person is casually familiar with Wikipedia, and they hear their friends call it “wiki”, and they’ve never heard of the general wiki concept… and then they happen upon CocoaDev, see that it describes itself as a wiki (which, to them, was previously not even a one-element category but just a single website; it would seem analogous to Bing calling itself “a google”), and import their expectations about “wiki”… then is that really a bias if they find many aspects of CocoaDev’s structure very surprising?
Maybe it’s a bias specifically if they fail to update their understanding of the concept “wiki” and instead assume that CocoaDev is doing something wrong.
I don’t know if that’s quite what’s happening here. It’s probably more that Wikipedia (and maybe a few other heavily Wikipedia-inspired, MediaWiki-based sites) is the only exposure most people will have to the wiki concept. The range of possibility didn’t exist in their minds in the first place.
Fair enough.
It could be described as a sort of group bias. People would have been capable of seeing a range of possibility except that a strong example channels their minds.
I wonder if that sort of thing should be added to the list of biases—it’s being so influenced by the most prominent example that one no longer perceives the range of possibility. It seems something like framing, but not exactly it.
I don’t know if that’s quite what’s happening here. It’s probably more that Wikipedia (and maybe a few other heavily Wikipedia-inspired, MediaWiki-based sites) is the only exposure most people will have to the wiki concept. The range of possibility didn’t exist in their minds in the first place.
I’m not sure if the effect whereby it skews people’s expectations of other later-discovered wikis is something like a qualitative rather than numeric version of anchoring (is there any research on that? Does it have a name?), or if it’s just an unsurprising and possibly rational result of people originally seeing “wiki” associated with a single site and not a larger category. If a person is casually familiar with Wikipedia, and they hear their friends call it “wiki”, and they’ve never heard of the general wiki concept… and then they happen upon CocoaDev, see that it describes itself as a wiki (which, to them, was previously not even a one-element category but just a single website; it would seem analogous to Bing calling itself “a google”), and import their expectations about “wiki”… then is that really a bias if they find many aspects of CocoaDev’s structure very surprising?
Maybe it’s a bias specifically if they fail to update their understanding of the concept “wiki” and instead assume that CocoaDev is doing something wrong.
Fair enough.
It could be described as a sort of group bias. People would have been capable of seeing a range of possibility except that a strong example channels their minds.