- Wisdom of the crowd
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The wisdom of the crowd refers to the process of taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert to answer a question. This process, while not new to the information age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources that rely on human opinion.[1] The process, in the business world at least, was written about in detail by James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds.[2]
Contents
Definition of crowd
The term crowd, in this usage, refers to any group of people, such as a corporation, a group of researchers, or simply the entire general public. The group itself does not have to be cohesive; for example, a group of people answering questions on Yahoo! Answers may not know each other outside of that forum, or a group of people betting on a horse race may not know each others' bets, but they nevertheless form a crowd under this definition.
Benefits
The wisdom of the crowd applies to democratic journalism in that a group of non-experts determine what news is important, and then people outside the group can view the news based on those rankings. The social news sites Digg and Newsvine both fall into this category and rely heavily upon the wisdom of the crowd in creating their content.
Problems
The crowd tends to make its best decisions if it is made up of diverse opinions and ideologies. A crowd of like-minded individuals may contain bias, which can cloud their judgment and cause a less useful response to a given question. Crowds tend to work best when there is a correct answer to the question being posed, such as a question about geography or mathematics.[3] The effect is easily undermined. Social influence can cause the average of the crowd answers to be wildly inaccurate, while the geometric mean and the median are far more robust.[4]
References
- ^ Baase, Sara. A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues for Computing and the Internet. 3. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2007. Pages 351-357. ISBN 0-13-600848-8.
- ^ Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Doubleday, 2004. ISBN 978-0385503860.
- ^ The wisdom of crowds: Q & A with James Surowiecki Random House
- ^ How Social Influence can Undermine the Wisdom of Crowd Effect, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences, 2011
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