Social Computing: Its Evolving Definition and Modeling in the Context of Collective Intelligence

“Social computing” is a keyword in contemporary society. However, if we ask anew what the term social computing means, we realize that its definition, meaning and modeling have not necessarily been clarified. This paper first investigates when questions are raised about “social computing.” We find that the oldest Wikipedia article on social computing was written on January 21, 2005. However, it is found that a major rewrite was done on October 17, 2007, which caused a great change in its definition. It seems that the reason for this change is the idea of collective intelligence that has been popularized in James Surowiecki´s book, The Wisdom of Crowds. In order to examine how the concept of social computing is accepted by and has infiltrated the web society, we performed an analysis of the search engine results page (SERF) using Google, specifying the search keyword as “social computing.” This paper investigates a formal model of social computing, which is described in contrast with the traditional computing scheme. Based on this model, we investigate the relationship between social computing and computer science, and we conclude that the Wikipedia article on social computing that states “social computing is a general term for an area of computer science ...” is inaccurate.