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The Wisdom of Community
by DEREK POWAZEK @ http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-wisdom-of-community/
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.
A great article by Derek introducing site owners to the wisdom of community. We invite you to get introduced to this concept and his web 2.0 approach to it, and read his full article on alistapart.com
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.
- Simplicity
- Interface
- Aggregation
- Participation
- Selfishness
- Scores
- Leader boards
- Explicit vs. implicit feedback
- Voting
- Wiser together than we would be alone