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:
[[[ The wisdom of crowds * p=Doubleday y=2004 a=USA r=20040921 An argument that groups of people can make very good decisions when there is diversity, independence, and decentralization within the group. This is augmented by case studies in traffic, science, committees, companies, markets and democracy. The wisdom of crowds + 4 In Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the audience got it right 91 percent of the time, the friend/expert at right 65 percent 10 the stock market identified Morton Thiokol because: the diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation 22 bookies, Google, IEM (election's), HSX (box-office), are all successful decision markets Diversity + 30 smaller groups need to actively pursue diversity 31 March: stale groups (without an influx of new naive members) spend too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring 34 experts aren't just wrong; they don't know how wrong they are 36 Irving Janis identified "Group think" in small homogeneous communities 38 Solomon Asch found that people often go with the wrong answer in a group -- but at least one confederate of a dissentor increases their autonomy Independence + 41 Independence isolates errors and garners more information 43 Milgram et al put increasingly large groups of men on the street corner looking up, others did the same, but not because of conformity, but of "social proof" 49 herding: no one ever got fired for buying IBM 53 information cascade: following a leader and with imperfect information, people stop looking to their own local knowledge 64 Hung and Blott performed an experiment with 2 urns, one with 50% more white or black marbles respectively. When an individual correct choice was awarded, people incorrectly cascaded; yet, when collectively rewarded, it was best to reveal one's own marble color Decentralization + 78 the problem with U.S. intelligence was not decentralization, but a bad form which didn't permit good filtration and aggregation 87 Brian Arthur "El Farol" problem: should one go to a bar that might be too crowded or empty? No easy solution , but it demonstrates that we used inductive processes in considering problems.