There are more clues available in a virtual environment
(than the real one)
Bringing online what other’s have observed in the past (in addition to what’s available in the here-and-now), and extending one’s reasoning into the knowledge of others (in addition to what one knows themselves) is a key value-add of participating in an online community. Clues from eBay reputation scores or from http://www.ratemds.com (where you can see just how well a doctor is liked by others) extends the reach of your peripheral vision and intuition with amplifications from observations of others.
Modeling reasoning is not easy due to the intricacies of semantics, and compositing reasoning from multiple parties is even harder. That’s where the Semantic Web, and conceptmapping come into play. But for all the technology helping to model, the most difficult is that compositing requires a group to align on their joint position. What’s fascinating about wikis is that they are a negotiation tool (unlike blogs, which are merely for communication), until people go through a joint modeling process, there will only be an exchange of views, not a deep integration and agreement on them.
