On his blog, Harvard’s Andrew McAfee mulls over some of the barriers to the successful adoption of Web 2.0 collaboration technologies by businesses. He points out that even the most prominent examples of Web 2.0 platforms, such as Wikipedia, are actually produced by a relatively small number of contributors. Many people may consume the product, but only a fraction of those contribute to its production. In addition to the famous “long tail” in demand for information goods, in other words, there’s a long tail of production. As McAfee puts it:

I think there’s also a long tail among people, and it relates not to willingness to consume (i.e. demand) but rather to willingness to produce. In November of 2005, the most recent month for which comprehensive stats are available, Wikipedia had over 850,000 articles in English, and 2.9 million across all languages … This content was generated by fewer than 50,000 contributors in English, and 103,000 total … And even this population is skewed: active English wikipedians (more than 5 contributions in a month) numbered 15,600 last November, and very active (100 or more) numbered only 2,081 …

If companies only get the same fraction of Intranet users to use [Web 2.0] tools, these tools will be roundly and rightly acclaimed as failures. Business leaders have to find ways to increase the ‘ambient percentage’ of internal wikipedians, bloggers, taggers, etc. well beyond what we’ve observed so far on the public Internet. Demonstrating that these tools will increase productivity, decrease workload, and put hours back in the week will certainly help, but I wonder if such demonstrations will be enough.

McAfee makes a critically important point. But I’d go even further. Although wikis and other Web 2.0 platforms for the creation of content are often described in purely egalitarian terms – as the products of communities of equals – that’s just a utopian fantasy. In fact, the quality of the product hinges not just, or even primarily, on the number of contributors. It also hinges on the talent of the contributors – or, more accurately, on the talent of every individual contributor. No matter how vast, a community of mediocrities will never be able to produce anything better than mediocre work. Indeed, I would argue that the talent of the contributors is in the end far more important to quality than is the number of contributors. Put 5,000 smart people to work on a wiki, and they’ll come up with something better than a wiki created by a million numbskulls.

The quality of any entry in Wikipedia, for instance, is ultimately determined not by how many people work on it but by how many talented people work on it. An entry written by a single expert will be better than an entry written by a hundred fools. When you look deeply into Wikipedia, beyond the shiny surface of “community,” you see that the encyclopedia is actually as much, or more, a product of conflict than of collaboration: It’s an endless struggle by a few talented contributors to clean up the mess left by the numbskull horde.

In a business context, the talent of the contributor pool is a particularly critical factor in the success of a Web 2.0 platform – far more important than the raw number of contributors or the ratio of contributors to total employees. As studies of organizational dynamics show, useful knowledge is not disseminated evenly throughout a business. The distribution is clumpy. A relatively few people hold a relatively large portion of the smarts, the expertise, the contacts, the political savvy and so on. Getting those people – the meritocratic elite – to contribute to a collaboration platform is a big challenge facing Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Those people, to speak generally, tend to be the busiest (the most in demand, anyway) and the least likely to have either the time or the interest to suffer the contributions of fools. They also have some very good economic and social reasons not to want to share their knowledge broadly without suitable compensation. As earlier knowledge-management failures have shown, the elite often have the least incentive to get involved, and without them, the project’s doomed.

Moreover, if the elite hold back at the start, the product is likely to be defined at the outset by the contributions of the mediocrities. That’s the kiss of death, because it turns off everyone else immediately. I wish I could say that companies should seek to find ways to both maximize the contributions of the organizational elite and minimize the contributions of the numbskulls, but if the former’s difficult, the latter’s impossible. When it comes to Web 2.0, if you build it, the numbskulls will come.

UPDATE: You knew it had to happen: A blogger has written a response to this post titled, without irony, “The Wisdom of Numbskulls.”