On Monday 02 May 2005 10:11, Stirling Newberry wrote:
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.
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.
I don't feel as if I need to defend Surowiecki, and I don't understand your point, but I think he's made a useful contribution as your own example demonstrates. If the asynchronous and bite-sized character of Open contributions contribute to their success (Benkler "fine-grained", Sproull "microcontributions"), is that all? What *kind* of micro-contributions are necessary? *If* the contributions are crap, if they they aren't coming from diverse participants (e.g., not "group think"), independent (e.g., not "herding"), and decentralized and filtered/aggregated well (e.g., not "US intelligence" ;) ) then they might be useful.