The "Power Law Distribution" or "Long Tail" Phenomenon

Question: The “power law distribution” or “long tail” phenomenon, as seen in behavior online on the Wikipedia, suggests that the concept of an average user of wikipedia is meaningless. Support your answer: how do you think a local, “JMU only” version of the Wikipedia would compare to the worldwide version? Would it be very similar? Higher quality? Less quality? Why?

The "power law distribution" suggests that "the gap between the first and second position is larger than the gap between second and third, and so on" (Shirky, 125). This means that in the terms of Wikipedia, the most active writer is generally much more active than the person second most active writer, and FAR more active than the average. In other words, "large social systems cannot be understood as a simple aggregation of the behavior of some nonexistent 'average' user" (Shirky, 125). This means that as a system gets larger, the imbalance between few and many gets larger, not smaller. If JMU has a version of Wikipedia I believe that the meaningless average user would react in the same way. The effects of the power law distribution are more clearly seen in the Wikipedia example because of the sheer number of people that participate globally. Because there are more users globally than just within the JMU community, the gap between the few and the many is much more evident, therefore, creating a lesser quality distribution. However, the "Long Tail" phenomenon shows the relationship between audience size and conversational pattern according to the power law distribution. (The chart can be seen on page 129.) In the aspect of tight knit conversation groups, the JMU only community would be able to function on a much deeper level than Wikipedia because as the audience grows larger, "the tight pattern of 'everyone connected to everyone' becomes impossible to support - conversation is still possible, but it is in a community that is much more loosely woven" (Shirky, 128).