Via Xavier Amatriain: The Dirty Little Secret About the “Wisdom of the Crowds” – There is No Crowd:
This is hardly the first time that the so-called “wisdom of the crowds” has been called into question. The term, which implies that a diverse collection of individuals makes more accurate decisions and predications than individuals or even experts, has been used in the past to describe how everything from Wikipedia to user-generated news sites like Digg.com offer better services than anything created by a smaller group could do.
Of course, we now know that simply isn’t true. For one thing, Wikipedia isn’t written and edited by the “crowd” at all. In fact, 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site’s edits. Even Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, has been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, “a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers.”
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Still, there [has] yet to be a perfect solution to the problem. Perhaps it’s time we give up the idea that the “wisdom of the crowds” was ever a driving force behind any socialized, user-generated anything and realize that, just like in life, there will always be active participants as well as the passive passerbys.
I have never quite liked the notion of “wisdom of crowds”, and the hype behind it even less, so I”m glad to see signs that the hype cycle is finally starting to wind down. However, by having to confront exactly what it was that I didn’t like about the notion, I was intellectually forced to propose an alternative: Explicit Collaboration in Search. As I wrote half a year ago: Continue reading…
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