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The Expectation Framework, The Pedia Effect, & Credibility at Scale

“Any process that can be cod­i­fied — that can be turned into an algo­rithm, becomes the basis of a ser­vice that can be deliv­ered, with­out friction.”
Bill Janeway, War­burg Pin­cus, Sep­tem­ber 24, 2014 on Bloomberg Sur­veil­lance.

The “Pedia Effect” Expec­ta­tion-Ful­fill­ment Frame­work — 2‑Stage Credibility at Scale

Credibility has tra­di­tion­ally been con­sid­ered a pas­sive by-prod­uct not an “actively man­u­fac­tured asset.” A fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing in assum­ing the “action” (the good behav­ior) pro­duced the credibility (which seem­ingly took for­ever as a “chrono­log­i­cal sequence”). Credibility isn’t the “action,” it’s the ful­fill­ment of a “promise of an action.” And when BOTH the “expec­ta­tion” and “ful­fil­ment” of that expec­ta­tion occur — credibility is rapidly and pow­er­fully gen­er­ated. (AI com­ments: Claude 3.5, Chat­GPT 4o)

The “Pedia Effect” Cog­ni­tive Heuris­tics & Biases
The sim­plest expla­na­tion is that vir­tu­ally every inter­net user, every­where has a pre-exist­ing per­cep­tion of what an “ency­clo­Pe­dia” is — from pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence or education.

The tech­ni­cal expla­na­tion is there’s a potent com­bi­na­tion of (“Sys­tem 1″) cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and behav­ioral biases all work­ing together to cre­ate that “ency­clo­Pe­dia” expec­ta­tion. (The “hard” part — Cre­at­ing spe­cific expec­ta­tions in con­sumers’ minds is dif­fi­cult, but when spe­cific expec­ta­tions are cre­ated, they are eas­ily ful­filled — because they’re specific.)

These cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases are (among oth­ers): the “rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ness heuris­tic,” the “avail­abil­ity heuris­tic,” the “fram­ing effect, and the “con­fir­ma­tion bias.” The first “if it looks like a ‘Pedia,’ reads like a ‘Pedia,’ etc.,” the sec­ond “I’ve seen lots of ‘Pedias’ in my life,” the third, “It says it’s a ‘Pedia,’ ” and finally “I could tell it was a ‘Pedia’ all along.”

When these mul­ti­ple cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases are all telling us that some­thing is an “inde­pen­dent third-party, higher author­ity (ITPHA) ency­clo­Pe­dia” — that is our expec­ta­tion. And MOST impor­tantly, when our expec­ta­tion is ful­filled (The “easy” part.) — we become true believ­ers, because we lit­er­ally can’t help it. 

The “Pedia Effect” ITPHA Expec­ta­tion — Pre­ced­ing Wikipedia
The “Pedia Effect” described in a Decem­ber 18, 2000 patent appli­ca­tion (“Method and Appa­ra­tus for Inter­net Mar­ket­ing and Trans­ac­tional Devel­op­ment”), is derived from the term “ency­cloPedia” which has long been the most widely used and time-proven infor­ma­tion brand that organ­i­cally gen­er­ates the high­est ITPHA per­cep­tion in con­sumers’ minds both off and online, pre­ceded the arrival of Wikipedia in 2001 (and the mech­a­nism of suc­cess). No other term comes close. The per­cep­tion is so pow­er­ful that even when con­sumers are told specif­i­cally (by Wikipedia itself and oth­ers) that the infor­ma­tion in Wikipedia is not reli­able, con­sumers don’t care and still seek the infor­ma­tion in droves. (Try plac­ing a notice on your (non-Pedia) web­site telling users your infor­ma­tion is not reli­able and have every school and col­lege telling their stu­dents the same thing and see if you get over 6 bil­lion vis­its per month!)

Why not before…
The main rea­son why no one thought to “man­u­fac­ture credibility” is the (Sys­tem 1) tra­di­tional belief of earn­ing credibility the “hard way” with “chrono­log­i­cal good behav­iors” (The Scout Oath and Law), which are time con­sum­ing, “brit­tle” (sin­gle points of fail­ure), and most of all, WRONG.

  • Credibility is NOT cre­ated by “actions” alone.
  • Credibility is cre­ated by the ful­fill­ment of the promise of an action.
  • Good behav­iors alone are just good behaviors
  • But good behav­iors ful­fill­ing a promise of good behav­iors — that’s credibility.
  • It’s the pre­ced­ing promise that con­verts it to credibility.

In the tra­di­tional old way you did your “good behav­iors” and hoped peo­ple would notice, and then hoped they would remem­ber. And over time, they would hope­fully remem­ber what you did the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that — until you finally cre­ate the “expec­ta­tion” of yet another “good behav­ior.” And now you’re into credibility ter­ri­tory. Easy-peasy, but long and drawn out over an extended period of time.

In the 21st cen­tury ver­sion, you cre­ate the “expec­ta­tions” (promises) first, then imme­di­ately ful­fill those expec­ta­tions. And instead of doing it “one-at-a-time,” you cre­ate hun­dreds, thou­sands, maybe even mil­lions — simultaneously.

While Wikipedia was cre­at­ing the world’s largest ency­clo­pe­dia (what it IS), they were tech­ni­cally “man­u­fac­tur­ing mul­ti­ple simul­ta­ne­ous instances of credibility at scale” (what it DOES). Arti­cles alone are just arti­cles — arti­cles in a Pedia are credibility because they’re ful­fill­ment of the Pedia expec­ta­tion. The very behav­ioral mech­a­nisms that gen­er­ate the credibility also cre­ate a “self-obscur­ing effect” that hide it from view.
(AI detailed exam­ples)

The Wikipedia Dichotomy
In Wikipedia — “Pedia” is the brand credibility image and tax­on­omy, while “wiki” is the exe­cu­tion model (requir­ing a dis­claimer). The “Pedia Effect” credibility is so pow­er­ful that it enabled Wikipedia to over­come the neg­a­tive “wiki effect” (of user-gen­er­ated con­tent) to become mas­sively pop­u­lar and author­i­ta­tive with­out adver­tis­ing, and with­out being con­sid­ered reli­able. As a “Wiki,” it was con­structed by “a bunch of nobod­ies” for aca­d­e­mic, non-com­mer­cial pur­poses that, “As a user-gen­er­ated source, it can be edited by any­one at any time, and any infor­ma­tion it con­tains at a par­tic­u­lar time could be van­dal­ism, a work in progress, or sim­ply incor­rect.”

The “Pedia Effect” works for all “Pedias” from the first online ency­clo­pe­dia to the finan­cial ency­clo­pe­dias, to the tech ency­clo­pe­dias, etc., ad infini­tum. The “Pedia for­mula” is the same — it does­n’t mat­ter if it’s 1, 2, or thou­sands of cre­ators - it’s the “pedia/encyclopedia” brand + “com­pre­hen­sive ever­green con­tent + adver­tis­ing (and trans­ac­tions for the com­mer­cial “for profit” ver­sions) or dona­tions (for the “non-profit” ver­sions).” Since Wikipedia is likely the only “Pedia” that for­mally states its infor­ma­tion is not reli­able, and yet it is the largest Pedia by far — the “credibility at scale” is powerful.

The Pedia Credibility Algo­rithm =  THVI  +  PON   +  AAM  +  ITPHA

Truth­ful High-Value Infor­ma­tion deliv­ered at the con­sumer’s Point Of Need Across All Markets by an Inde­pen­dent Third-Party Higher Author­ity
(Max­i­mum Credibility at Scale)

Three val­ues in the Pedia Credibility Algo­rithm are givens: 

Truth­ful High-Value Infor­ma­tion -
Truth­ful infor­ma­tion con­sumers use to make their buy­ing deci­sions includ­ing: spec­i­fi­ca­tions, reviews, com­par­isons, rat­ings, etc.
Point Of Need -
The point when con­sumers are seek­ing such infor­ma­tion.
Across All Markets
The con­ve­nience of pro­vid­ing truth­ful high-value infor­ma­tion on all the prod­ucts and ser­vices con­sumers want in one location.

“Pedia” is the final “cat­a­lyst” in the algorithm:

Inde­pen­dent Third-Party Higher Author­ity
Brand/Perception/Expectation 

Mar­keters and Con­sumers Can Take Back Their Power — Forever
This same “Pedia Effect” enables a “bunch of pow­er­ful some­bod­ies” (mar­keters), with adver­tis­ing and credibility, to build a “mar­ket­ing-Pedia” that pro­vides con­sumers with “every­thing they want to know about every­thing they want to buy” in con­ve­nient com­pany “ency­cloPedias” using the same “Pedia” brand that gen­er­ates the ITPHA per­cep­tion, tax­on­omy, and ful­fill­ment in con­sumers’ minds. By cre­at­ing com­pre­hen­sive, truth­ful com­pany “ency­cloPedias” at scale and includ­ing the “pedia” suf­fix or “ency­clo­pe­dia” in the title or name, mar­keters can take back their power from the Big Tech Mega-Monop­oly Mid­dle­men (BTM3) and pre­vent total dom­i­na­tion by BTM3+AI. (Best AI insur­ance ever.)

Truth­ful High-Value Informa­tion “Pedias” are cre­ated by mar­keters on their com­pany web­sites by repur­pos­ing exist­ing infor­ma­tion about their com­pany, prod­ucts, and ser­vices. Whether it’s the tra­di­tional word of mouth from a friend, an expert review, or infor­ma­tion from a cred­i­ble source con­sumers believe, the most pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing is always Truth­ful High-Value Infor­ma­tion deliv­ered at the con­sumer’s Point Of Need by an Inde­pen­dent Third-Party Higher Author­ity that con­sumers believe and remem­ber. And this is exactly what the “Pedia” deliv­ers.

The “Pedia Effect” cre­ates “2 for 1” Pedia platforms
That come in two ver­sions, “indi­vid­ual” and “net­work.” Mar­keters cre­ate indi­vid­ual Pedia plat­forms on their web­sites and with the sim­ple addi­tion of a few lines of code, these indi­vid­ual plat­forms trans­par­ently join the Pedi­aNet­work® plat­form, still under 100% con­trol of the mar­keter, but with the added power of “net­work effects.” An aggre­gated Pedi­aNet­work® of indi­vid­ual mar­keter “ency­clo­Pe­dias” cre­ates a con­sumer-direct PON “mar­ket­ing-Pedia” more pow­er­ful than any POI adver­tis­ing plat­form in his­tory — con­trolled by mar­keters and con­sumers together — not another BTM3.

 

  • The most pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing is high-value infor­ma­tion deliv­ered at the con­sumer’s point-of-need.

    The Atlantic, June 13, 2014 - “Think about how much you can learn about prod­ucts today before see­ing an ad. Com­ments, user reviews, friends’ opin­ions, price-com­par­i­son tools: These things aren’t adver­tis­ing (although they’re just as ubiq­ui­tous). In fact, they’re much more pow­er­ful than adver­tis­ing because we con­sider them infor­ma­tion rather than mar­ket­ing. The dif­fer­ence is enor­mous: We seek infor­ma­tion, so we’re more likely to trust it; mar­ket­ing seeks us, so we’re more likely to dis­trust it.”

  • “Ency­clo­pe­dia” is the most pow­er­ful and proven con­sumer infor­ma­tion brand to organ­i­cally gen­er­ate the per­cep­tion of “inde­pen­dent third-party, higher author­ity credibility” in con­sumers’ minds, e.g. Wikipedia, Investo­pe­dia, Soft­pe­dia, energy-pedia, Future­pe­dia, Sumo­pe­dia, Webo­pe­dia and over 60,000 ency­clo­pe­dias at Ama­zon.

    Obvi­ously own­ers of the var­i­ous “pedias” were inten­tion­ally using the credibility asso­ci­ated with an “ency­clo­pe­dia.” And the over­whelm­ing num­bers of “ency­clo­pe­dias” tes­tify to the suc­cess of the “pedia” brand in ful­fill­ing the expec­ta­tions of both the own­ers and their cus­tomers. How­ever most do not give much thought to the “why it works” and the rela­tion to “behav­ioral cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases.”

    In gen­er­at­ing the “inde­pen­dent third-party, higher author­ity” per­cep­tion in con­sumers’ minds, the “pedia” infor­ma­tion brand trig­gers 4 behav­ioral cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases that work together — the “rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ness heuris­tic,” the “avail­abil­ity heuris­tic,” the “fram­ing effect” and the “con­fir­ma­tion bias.”

    The “rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ness heuris­tic” is the “looks like a duck, walks like a duck, flies like a duck — so it must be a duck,” the “avail­abil­ity heuris­tic” is “I’ve seen ducks at the park,” the “fram­ing effect” is “It says it’s a duck,” and then the “con­fir­ma­tion bias” kicks in with “I knew it was a duck all along.” (“pedia” is the “duck”)

    Indi­vid­u­ally these cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases are per­sua­sive — but together they are extremely pow­er­ful and very dif­fi­cult to over­come, because they are all exam­ples of “Sys­tem 1” vs “Sys­tem 2” thinking.

  • “Despite being one of the most vis­ited sites, it is not con­sid­ered to be a cred­i­ble source by the aca­d­e­mic com­mu­nity. Even though the aca­d­e­mic com­mu­nity con­sid­ers Wikipedia as the eas­i­est source of infor­ma­tion, cit­ing Wikipedia in your research paper is not accept­able” Sci­en­tific Edit­ing, March 1, 2020.

     

    Note: Despite not being “cred­i­ble” Wikipedia is peren­ni­ally a top-10 most vis­ited site in the world. (Cur­rently #7 — Aug­gust, 2023 by Sim­i­lar­web)

  • “The ques­tion that is most often asked about cog­ni­tive illu­sions is whether they can be over­come. The mes­sage of these exam­ples is not encour­ag­ing. Because Sys­tem 1 oper­ates auto­mat­i­cally and can­not be turned off at will, errors of intu­itive thought are often dif­fi­cult to pre­vent. Biases can­not always be avoided, because Sys­tem 2 may have no clue to the error. Even when cues to likely errors are avail­able, errors can be pre­vented only by the enhanced mon­i­tor­ing and effort­ful activ­ity of Sys­tem 2. As a way to live your life, how­ever, con­tin­u­ous vig­i­lance is not nec­es­sar­ily good, and it is cer­tainly imprac­ti­cal. Con­stantly ques­tion­ing our own think­ing would be impos­si­bly tedious, and Sys­tem 2 is much too slow and inef­fi­cient to serve as a sub­sti­tute for Sys­tem 1 in mak­ing rou­tine deci­sions. The best we can do is a com­pro­mise: learn to rec­og­nize sit­u­a­tions in which mis­takes are likely and try harder to avoid sig­nif­i­cant mis­takes when the stakes are high.”

    Daniel Kah­ne­man
    2002 Nobel Prize in Economics

    From Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can, June 15, 2012

     

  • Ful­fill­ment Case Examples

    1995 – Auto­pe­dia — The Auto­mo­tive Ency­clo­pe­dia, was the first free online encyclo­pedia and win­ner of Yahoo Inter­net Life’s 1998 4‑star (high­est) award for auto­mo­tive lemon laws. The other top five 4‑star win­ners were “Con­sumer Reports,” “Edmund’s Auto­mo­tive Buyer’s Guides,” Microsoft’s “Car Point,” and “Car and Dri­ver Mag­a­zine.” Auto­pe­dia was included in more than 100 books, includ­ing col­lege text­books, con­sumer guides, the Judge Advo­cate General’s Corps and finally, inclu­sion in Trans­former comic books. All of Auto­pe­dia, includ­ing the graph­ics, pro­gram­ming, edi­to­r­ial con­tent, the research on lemon laws through­out the USA – was cre­ated by 1 per­son, part-time, late at night in his liv­ing room.

    1999 – Investo­pe­dia was cre­ated by 2 col­lege stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of Alberta, in Edmon­ton, Canada, who wanted to “explain the com­plex world of finance in every­day lan­guage.” Investo­pe­dia was sold to Forbes in 2007 for an undis­closed sum. Forbes sold it in 2010 to Val­ueClick for $42 mil­lion, and in 2013 Val­ueClick sold it (with other prop­er­ties) to IAC for $80 million.

    2001 – Wikipedia — The Free Ency­clo­pe­dia, is known through­out the world and is the 6–7th largest site on the Inter­net with bil­lions (6.7B) of monthly vis­its, mil­lions of arti­cles, includ­ing tens of mil­lions of pages in just the Eng­lish ver­sion. Wikipedia is non-profit, cre­ated by thou­sands of vol­un­teer edi­tors, does no adver­tis­ing, is not con­sid­ered a cred­i­ble source by schools and uni­ver­si­ties and itself specif­i­cally states on its pages that, “Wikipedia is not a reli­able source.” Imag­ine any web­site, much less an “ency­clo­pe­dia” web­site, where schools and col­leges tell stu­dents that the con­tent is not con­sid­ered cred­i­ble and the web­site itself is stat­ing the same thing. And still the peo­ple keep com­ing by the bil­lions.

    In all “Pedia Effect” use cases the model is exactly the same – a “pedia brand (expec­ta­tion) + ever­green con­tent (ful­fill­ment) + ads” (for prof­its) or “+ dona­tions” (for non-prof­its). And since 2001 there have been many “Pedias” uti­liz­ing the same model and in every case the “Pedia Effect” gen­er­ates pow­er­ful ITPHA brand heuris­tics that con­sumers per­ceive as authen­tic, cred­i­ble, and trust­wor­thy, regard­less of whether the con­tent (ful­fill­ment) is cre­ated by — one per­son, two col­lege stu­dents, or thou­sands of vol­un­teer con­trib­u­tors, and regard­less of what the cre­ators or any­one else has to say about the credibility or reli­a­bil­ity of the con­tent. Peo­ple over­whelm­ingly believe what’s in a “pedia.”

    The “Pedia Effect’s” com­bi­na­tion of behav­ioral cog­ni­tive biases and heuris­tics is the only log­i­cal expla­na­tion for the durable credibility, authen­tic­ity, and trust that peo­ple per­ceive of the con­tent in every “pedia” despite any and all warnings.

    The value of such per­cep­tions in an aca­d­e­mic non-profit is immense (Wikipedia), but the value of these per­cep­tions applied in a com­mer­cial for-profit enter­prise are beyond mea­sure — adding credibility to all past, present, and future mar­ket­ing efforts, increas­ing returns from all past mar­ket­ing – and cre­at­ing a pow­er­ful “point-of-need” (PON) mar­ket­ing plat­form with a direct con­nec­tion to con­sumers inten­tion­ally seek­ing the infor­ma­tion – a “com­mer­cial Wikipedia.”