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.
Explicit vs. implicit feedback
In many of the examples I’ve used, wisdom is gleaned from user behavior. In these cases, the feedback is implicit. In other cases we ask users outright for feedback, as in voting systems. That’s explicit. Whether you use explicit or implicit feedback, or some combination of the two, is an important decision in designing any WOC system.
In working on your own WOC systems, pay attention to when you can glean implicit feedback without having to ask for it directly. Implicit feedback is usually more honest and less prone to gaming. There are also ways to mix the two, for example, asking for explicit voting, but comparing it to implicit data (such as page views, comments, or other recordable user actions).
Voting
This sounds undemocratic, but voting does not have to rule all in WOC systems. In many cases, it shouldn’t.
Just because you’re collecting votes doesn’t mean you have to crown the item with the most votes the winner. You could just as easily look for items that are controversial (high percentage of both good and bad votes) or are undiscovered (low number of total votes).
And remember that not all votes have to be equal. Votes from “good” members (however you determine good) can have a higher impact.
Studies show that when rating a series of items, users are more likely to vote bad in succession. In other words, once you start voting bad, you’re more likely to keep voting bad. So it would be fair to count a bad vote less if it comes after another bad vote by that user. Or just keep the length of time in that voting session as a variable, and see what happens when you alter how you weigh early votes vs late ones. If someone’s been voting for an hour, does that make them more valuable or less? Experiment to find out.
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.