If you play WoW and have never used Thottbot.com, you should stop whatever you're doing and check out Thottbot. But regardless of whether you play WoW, anyone interested in online communities should be fascinated with what Thottbot is doing.
At first glance, Thottbot looks like a normal third-party MMORPG information site. Try searching for "Fiery Enchantments" - a lvl 42 quest in the game. Thottbot has the details of the quest stored. But imagine I just picked up this quest and I don't know where these "dragon whelps" are that drop the "black drake's heart". If I follow the "black drake heart" link, Thottbot shows me all the mobs that drop it, their level ranges, and most importantly where to find them. Click on the "map" link next to the lvl 41 Scalding Whelp. Thottbot dynamically generates a map of the zone where these mobs are found and their spawn range. All items, quests, mobs and maps are cross-referenced in Thottbot.
Now, you might think that Thottbot has this information because of constant submissions from good-hearted players (which is how other sites do it), but that's not what's happening. There is a free custom GUI called Cosmos which allows customized toolbars as well as mods that add functionality. Of interest to us here is that Cosmos also sends information (optional) to the Thottbot database from every player who uses it. Every mob, item, quest and player character that is encountered has their stats and location tracked and sent to Thottbot automatically.
In other words, the expertise of individual players is automatically tracked, stored and shared by the system. More importantly, the aggregation of their expertise allows the discovery of what would otherwise be hard to know - the spawning ranges of mobs, the drop rates of rare and uncommon items, and so on.
You may argue that this is the same thing as Google, but Google requires deliberate, articulated knowledge (webpages) whereas Thottbot automatically tracks behaviors. Also, while Google can pagerank according to links, it can't aggregate knowledge to produce meta-knowledge (drop rates, spawn ranges, etc.) that require the correct aggregation of incoming data.
Contemporary work is becoming more and more about information manipulation, but information management is still an incredibly difficult thing to do in large corporations or academic institutions. Thottbot gives us a glimpse of a world where expertise can be seamlessly transferred - without needing to articulate our knowledge, without needing to track down experts, and being able to find the bigger picture even if we only have a small piece of information.
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