Also all hyped up by “The Wisdom of Crowds” and “We are smarter than Me” ?

Time for some anti-dose 😉

Two articles about some recent studies done on this subject. One from ReadWriteWeb and one from MIT Technology Review. It’s again from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The author professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today’s web.

The articles speak for themselves, but what’s also interesting are the comments on the MIT article.

Some quotes:

I think that crowds are not wise and what we call Wisdom of Crowds is nothing else and not more than the Power of Diversity. This paper shows that it can be the Weakness of Diversity too.

OR

The true critic is NOT motivated by money or the subjective personal biases of the non-critic. A true critic is motivated by the objective enhancement of the human experience through careful and educated examination of the subject at hand.  We need more well-honed critical voices and less of the braying of the crowd. Crowd wisdom is built on a logical fallacy: just because a lot of people say it is so, doesn’t make it so.

Democractic Intelligence = FAIL.

OR this one is even better:

The conversation needs to be different when we are talking about social networks within an organization’s firewall. In that instance, it’s not about trusting the crowd’s wisdom. Rather, it’s about managing the community by knowing whose input should be trusted, along with managing and moderating the community. This must all be done in the context of how the community relates to business initiatives and the information assets of the organization. At our company, Inmagic, we call this the

"social volume knob."

As organizations roll out social technologies, they might want to start with the volume knob set "low" for certain classes of users. For example, some users might be allowed to tag one type of content, or other certain users can blog or comment.

Controversy ? Sure. What do you think ? Still 100% convinced of the Wisdom of Crowds ?