I came across this article some time ago and marked it as something to examine when there was time. I’m working on the time part, but I wanted to note it here for a couple of reasons:

First, the relationship between the individual and collective is central to folklore studies and, I think, makes folklore a good fit for the study of complex systems but with an action-able focus. (That is, we look at texts as they flow through networks of individuals: texts give us relationships and the values and ideas behind behaviors.)

Second, I think there’s something to be said in swiveling the point of view to texts themselves as collections of clauses and passages.

All that noted, here’s the abstract and the URL

What Makes Individual I’s a Collective We: Coordination Mechanisms and Costs

Jisung Yoon, Chris Kempes, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, Geoffrey West, Hyejin Youn

For a collective to become greater than the sum of its parts, individuals’ efforts and activities must be coordinated or regulated. Not readily observable and measurable, this particular aspect often goes unnoticed and understudied in complex systems. Diving into the Wikipedia ecosystem, where people are free to join and voluntarily edit individual pages with no firm rules, we identified and quantified three fundamental coordination mechanisms and found they scale with an influx of contributors in a remarkably systemic way over three order of magnitudes. Firstly, we have found a super-linear growth in mutual adjustments (scaling exponent: 1.3), manifested through extensive discussions and activity reversals. Secondly, the increase in direct supervision (scaling exponent: 0.9), as represented by the administrators’ activities, is disproportionately limited. Finally, the rate of rule enforcement exhibits the slowest escalation (scaling exponent 0.7), reflected by automated bots. The observed scaling exponents are notably robust across topical categories with minor variations attributed to the topic complication. Our findings suggest that as more people contribute to a project, a self-regulating ecosystem incurs faster mutual adjustments than direct supervision and rule enforcement. These findings have practical implications for online collaborative communities aiming to enhance their coordination efficiency. These results also have implications for how we understand human organizations in general.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org.