Reworked diagram

Honestly... I'd worry that if the diagram is labile enough that my one opinion is enough to change a negative feedback to a positive and combine two categories, based on phrases that I barely understand, then the whole "theory" should probably be dropped entirely as unproven and perhaps unprovable speculation. Sorry... but I'd been thinking there must be some sort of survey or brainstorming session behind this and that someone had a better idea of what was intended.

Even so, I do think that participation has a positive feedback on quality - with Citizendium being a classic demonstration that without participation, it doesn't matter how carefully the wiki is designed to promote quality. Every small wiki has short, vague articles - and even the worst designed wiki analogs, like Hudong and Baike Baidu, which don't generally mark up inline references and editing history as they should, still manage to include highly informative documents.

Trust me, your opinion didn't cause a total flip-flop. The problem with these system diagrams is that the arcs are not weighted. (You can actually specify weight, but I don't think we understand this well enough to do it accurately.) How we chose to represent participation has been troubling me for some time, so getting some additional feedback helped.

There has been a ton of research behind all of this work. But to suggest that anyone totally understands how this all works would be flat out wrong. At the end of the day, a theory is just a theory.

This is where our priority around innovation comes in. One reason for being innovative is simply to increase our understanding. Let's be thoughtful about what we do, but let's not get into the trap of analysis paralysis either. If Ward Cunningham had done a detailed analysis of whether wikis could work before he created them, he probably never would have bothered.

Your point about Citizendium and Hudong and Baidu are well taken. There all these content farms cropping up on the Internet these days, and they're getting great penetration, but the quality is horrific. We obviously don't want to be that.