The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge

We have used 19.9 million papers over 5 decades and 2.1 million patents to demonstrate that teams increasingly dominate solo authors in the production of knowledge. Research is increasingly done in teams across nearly all fields. Teams typically produce more frequently cited research than individuals do, and this advantage has been increasing over time. Teams now also produce the exceptionally high-impact research, even where that distinction was once the domain of solo authors. These results are detailed for sciences and engineering, social sciences, arts and humanities, and patents, suggesting that the process of knowledge creation has fundamentally changed.

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Currently, any group blog (like Freakonomics or Midas Oracle) is in fact an aggregation of solo blogs —in the example above, Justin Wolfers wrote his blog post without the assistance of Steve Levitt (just like I’m writing this present blog post without the direct supervision of our Scientific Advisory Board chief Michael Giberson).

In the future, I foresee a process where a blog post could be written by at least 2 bloggers (i.e., 2 co-authors). I have looked into this issue, and concluded that WordPress is not yet ready for that. But it’s coming… It’s coming… Push… Push…

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Technical Note on WordPress 2.5:

1. I regret that, in WordPress 2.5, it’s now impossible to sort post archives by blog author. WordPress is written by young white males who don’t have any experience with group blogs and blog communities.
2. The usability bozos who overhauled the WordPress administration menus decided that you now have to click on a post/comment title to edit it —thus breaking the Web convention which says that you click on a weblink to open it, not to edit it. … I’m not the only one having trouble with this.

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1. The CO-AUTHORS plugin, which does what it says. One specific post or page can be assigned two or more co-author(s) by the blog editor. Very interesting. (I don’t get why the plugin developer forbids the co-authors to “edit” the post/page, though. Mystery, which I will try to clear up with the software architect of this plugin.)
2. The ROLE MANAGER plugin (not listed in the official WordPress plugin directory), which changes the standard WordPress matrix of roles and capabilities. It can redefine the capabilities of one category of users (i.e., one “role”), and can change the capabilities of one individual, but won’t assign common capabilities on a post/page-by-post/page basis (unlike the CO-AUTHORS plugin). To put it in another way, the ROLE MANAGER plugin can be used to extend (or restrict) the capabilities of the blog authors. Right now, they can only publish a post, not a page. In this instance, they would be allowed to write and edit pages —without the need for the blog administrator to promote these authors as full editors (which would be tricky since those multiple editors could then edit their peers’ posts –not acceptable in a big group blog with 71 blog posters).

Very interesting.

On Midas Oracle, one could have:

• Authors Mike Giberson and Adam Siegel writing together a post on “How Great An Exchange Inkling Markets Is“.
• Authors Chris Masse, Mike Giberson, David Pennock and Jason Ruspini writing together a page on “The Ultimate Prediction Market Definition“.
• Etc., etc., etc.
• If plenty of co-authors collaborate on a post/page, then my hope is that Midas Oracle could become more than just a “blog”, and be also a vertical encyclopedia on prediction markets. (Of course, participation inequality remains an issue.)

[External Reading: For the life of you, don't miss this blog post by Tim O'Reilly on Wikipedia.]

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UPDATE: The creator of the CO-AUTHORS plugin writes back to me:

Not allowing all of the co-authors the ability to edit a page is not by design; I just have to do more research on WordPress permissions to find out how to do so, if even it is possible.

I wonder whether using the two plugins together is the solution…

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UPDATE: My current thought is to give each Midas Oracle author the capability to create, write up and edit his/her own page(s). And then to assign co-authors to some post(s) and page(s), on a case-by-case basis.