Presence of an Ecosystem: an Answer to "why is Whole Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts" in the Knowledge Building Process.

The phenomenal success of certain crowdsourced online platforms, such as Wikipedia, is accredited to their ability to tap the crowd’s potential to collaboratively build knowledge. While it is well known that the crowd’s collective wisdom surpasses the cumulative individual expertise, little is understood on the dynamics of knowledge building in a crowdsourced environment. Our experiment shows that an important reason for the rapid knowledge building in such an environment is due to variance in expertise. A proper understanding of the dynamics of knowledge building in a crowdsourced environment would enable one in the better designing of wiki styled environments to solicit knowledge from the crowd. We use, as our test bed, a customized Crowdsourced Annotation System (CAS) which provides a group of users the facility to annotate a given document. Our results show the presence of different genres of proficiency which accelerate the process of knowledge building by the synergetic interaction amongst the users. We observe that the crowdsourced knowledge ecosystem comprises of four categories of contributors, namely: Probers, Solvers, Articulators and Explorers. We infer from our experiment that the knowledge garnering mainly happens due to the synergetic interaction across these categories.