CONSISTENT PATTERNS IN LARGE - SCALE COLLABORATION - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 103

of participation are indistinguishable. This follows for every case we have
examined, and at all scales: Individual challenges give the same plots with the
same slope [9]. This is strong support for an underlying power law mechanism
since it is the only distribution that is scale free [6].
There is every reason to expect these power law properties to extend to
every type of large online collaboration, in part because of the diversity and
number of our private-sector data sets [9] and because the contributions to
Wikipedia, perhaps the largest open collaborative intellectual effort of all time,
follow the same pattern [10].

6.4 VALUE OF AN IDEA

Whether or not the power law property matters depends on the value of
what we are measuring, specifi cally whether the ideas from the “head” (those
relatively few people who put in many ideas each) are more or less valuable
than those from the “tail” (those many people who put in very few ideas
each). Figure 6.3 suggests three general possibilities, where the ideas are
counted in the same order as the participation level of their authors, that is,
ideas from the most prolifi c authors at the left and from the occasional authors
to the right.

Figure 6.3 Models of cumulative value vs. cumulative quantity, where quantity (hori-
zontal axis) is ordered by author rank (as in Figs. 6.1 and 6.2): ( a ) “ head ” participants
have better ideas; ( b ) all ideas are (probabilistically) equal; ( c ) “ tail ” participants have
better ideas.