Archive for the ‘wisom-of-crowds’ tag
How wise are crowds really?
A lot has been said about the wisdom of crowds, and how the ‘crowds’ built Wikipedia. In fact, to a large extent this assumed ‘wisdom’ is the premise of everything that’s happening in the Web 2.0 space.
Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb makes a good point of having some rules to get the best out of crowds in his recent post (as a follow-up to a similar post last year).
- Crowds should operate within constraints
- Not everything can be democratic
- Crowds must retain their individuality
- Crowds are better at vetting content than creating it
These rules may make a lot of sense because we all know the “herd behavior” and how “dumb” it can get at times. But like most other things in life, there is no best way of doing ‘it’, and surely “one size doesn’t fit all”. Now ‘that’ is an art more than a science, so know the rules, but don’t always play by them I guess…
