On May 2, 2005, at 10:01 AM, Joseph Reagle wrote:
On Monday 02 May 2005 08:54, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Alex Krupp wrote:
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way
It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and that wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
It's important to understand *why* he argues there is wisdom in crowds. I don't know if you've read it and disagree with the fundamentals, but it requires three specific conditions: diversity, independence, and decentralization within the group. This seems very appropriate to WP. Excerpts from my mindmap [1] on this particular note are below:
[[[
I've read it, it is the "Dow 36,000" for the 90s. Some of his specific examples I know, for a fact, are bunkum. He confuses cause and effect consistently. Crowds aren't smart, it is that if a system is set up where most people do the wrong thing, the system breaks. Wikipedia, when and where it works (which is most of it at the moment) works because it is guided towards people making the right, rather than the wrong, decisions.