The theory behind “wisdom of the crowds”
depends on the crowd members forming their independent opinion without
reference to the opinion of others. There is research that shows that “wisdom
of the crowds” does not hold when the “crowd” knows one
another’s opinions (the “lets go around the room and hear what
people have to say” approach heavily biases the later responses to match
the consensus of the earlier responses), that is, you get “group think”.
Experts are likely to have studied a range
of evidence and other sources, so hopefully less likely to be engaged in “group
think”, but scientific theories now widely accepted have been ridiculed
and/or suppressed when first introduced because they were contrary to the views
widely held by other experts in the same field, so even experts are not immune
to “group think”.
Nobody is automatically right and nobody
is automatically wrong. We just have to do our best to be careful in our
assessment of the reliability of sources.
Kerry
From:
wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of ENWP Pine
Sent: Sunday, 8 July 2012 9:19 AM
To: Research-l Wikimedia;
wikimedia-l
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Wisdom
of the crowd vs. wisdom of the experts andinsiders
I thought this was interesting so
I’m passing it along. This sentence particularly caught my attention:
“The answer, I think, is to take the best of what both experts and
markets have to offer, realizing that the combination of the two offers a
better window onto the future than either alone.” Substitute the word
“crowds” for “markets”, and perhaps there is something
here that could be applied to Wikipedia in our quest for quality, mixing the
best of expertise and crowdsourcing. I’d be very interested in hearing
comments from other Wikipedians.
Cheers,
Pine