This is a sample article, intended to represent a real-world situation.
It was written by DEREK POWAZEK and I lay no claim to authorship. Read the original.
It’s one of the most important concepts on the web today—perhaps the most important for social media—but it’s one of the least understood. When James Surowiecki wrote The Wisdom of Crowds in 2004, he explored the stock market and other classic social psychology examples, but “web 2.0” was still nascent. It’s time to connect his ideas to the social web, where they can reach their full potential.
The Wisdom of Crowds (WOC) theory does not mean that people are smart in groups—they’re not. Anyone who’s seen an angry mob knows it. But crowds, presented with the right challenge and the right interface, can be wise. When it works, the crowd is wiser, in fact, than any single participant.
The standard example is this: Imagine you have a jar of pennies. Ask a few hundred people how many there are inside. When you tally the results, chances are, all the guesses will be wrong. But if you average all the answers, the result will be almost perfect, almost all the time.
The web, with its low barrier to entry and permeable social boundaries, is the ultimate medium through which to explore the finer points of the wisdom of crowds. You’re surrounded by online examples: Google’s search results. BitTorrent. The “Most E-mailed” stories on your favorite news site. Each is powered by wisdom gleaned from crowds online.
You need a few things to enable online crowds to be wise.
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This article is really long, so I've omitted a couple sections.
Long asides should use this sidebar styling (pulled to the right edge). Short asides, like related reading or pullquotes, go in the left margin.
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Simplicity
This is what a short aside looks like. Long asides demoed on the right.
In the penny jar example, you ask each participant for a number. Google didn’t ask anyone anything to create their search results, though they just intuited the importance of every page in their index by considering how often it was linked to.
Note that in each case mentioned above—Google, BitTorrent, “Most E-mailed” lists, and the penny jar—the inputs are not conversational. Conversational inputs are too complex for Wisdom of Crowds systems. Online discussion systems do not lead to wisdom on their own.
The simplicity of the individual task is also important. Systems based on the Wisdom of Crowds can tackle surprisingly complicated projects, but each project must first be broken down to its simplest possible components.
Wiser together than we would be alone
These aspects of the Wisdom of Crowds are just the start — there’s a lot more to learn. Be sure to pick up Surowiecki’s book. And remember, WOC systems must evolve: you’re never done. But done right, they can change the way we live online, and maybe make us all a little wiser.