What Do an Army of Ants and an Online Encyclopedia Have in Common?

“Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions,” according to Wikipedia. “The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent.” Wikipedia should know all about stigmergy, since it’s almost a perfect description of how Wikipedia itself is made. While this model of collaboration is most commonly associated with ants, not global knowledge sharing, we’ll explore both and how they’ve shaped our world through asynchronous collaboration.

Join us as we talk to Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation (the nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia), and Clint Penick, an ant researcher and assistant research professor in the Biomimicry Center at Arizona State University.

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