Wisdom and Intelligence

One of the corner­stones of most defin­i­tions of Web 2.0 is the idea of the Wisdom of Crowds. In Tim O’Reilly’s seminal essay on the subject, he talks about the blo­go­sphere being an example of this:

If it were merely an amp­li­fier, blogging would be unin­ter­esting. But like Wikipedia, blogging har­nesses col­lective intel­li­gence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any indi­vidual document, the col­lective atten­tion of the blo­go­sphere selects for value.

Other examples which are some­times cited include digg, Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia and del.icio.us. People come together to solve problems and their combined effort produces better results than an indi­vidual editor or news team could manage.

However, we’re actually smudging together two con­trasting decision-​​making mech­an­isms here. Henry Jenkins points out in a post related to game design that there’s a sig­ni­ficant dif­fer­ence between Pierre Levy’s idea of Collective Intelligence and James Surowiecki’s topic, The Wisdom of Crowds.

The Wisdom of Crowds emerges when data from a number of sources is aggreg­ated. The people con­trib­uting need to be acting autonom­ously according to the best of their ability and in com­pet­i­tion with others. The famous example is guessing the weight of the prize bull: the average of people’s guesses turns out to be the correct answer.

Collective Intelligence, on the other hand, emerges through delib­er­a­tion, where people share, alter and evaluate other’s con­tri­bu­tions to arrive at common ground.

As Jenkins notes, Wikipedia is much closer to this second model, Collective Intelligence, than the Wisdom of Crowds approach that finds the math­em­at­ical mean of all the sug­gested ‘answers’. The same would be true of Yahoo! Answers and del.icio.us, and indeed of most Web 2.0 applic­a­tions that revolve around a com­munity approach.

The Wisdom of Crowds model does in some ways apply, however, to things like the digg front page**, flickr inter­est­ing­ness and Google PageRank, which are algorith­mic­ally determ­ined based on the combined anonymous and com­pet­itive input of many people.

It isn’t really a question of one of these models being better than the other, Jenkins con­cludes. It’s more that we’re not going to get very far unless we realise that they are two dif­ferent things:

Both “col­lective intel­li­gence” and “the wisdom of crowds” offer pro­ductive models for game design but we will get nowhere if we confuse the two. They rep­resent very dif­ferent accounts for know­ledge pro­duc­tion in the digital age and they will result in very dif­ferent design choices.

I’d contend that the approach chosen by an applic­a­tion designer very much depends on the nature of the problem that is being addressed. Both could be correct depending on the situ­ation, and probably one approach would be more sensible than the other for any given applic­a­tion. Completely anonymous postings to Wikipedia with no editing hier­archy what­so­ever probably wouldn’t be such a great plan, though it would bring it closer to the wisdom of crowds model. On the other hand, the col­lective intel­li­gence method of measured delib­er­a­tion and dis­cus­sion about which stories to put on the front page of digg or which sites should appear at the top of Google searches probably wouldn’t work out too well either.

[**Actually, digg is inter­esting in this regard. The sub­mis­sion of stories is not anonymous, nor is the voting. This has led to lots of accus­a­tions of bloc voting, alleg­a­tions of a self-​​reinforcing elite of top diggers, and adjust­ments to the pro­mo­tion algorithm to try to prevent this. It is a strange amalgam of social com­munity and wise-​​crowds news aggreg­ator. The owners (and pre­sum­ably enough of the users) want it that way. If the owners didn’t want the social com­munity aspect, and the problems that has created, they’d remove all mention of user names and make voting anonymous. It’s my belief that the gaming aspect to digg is entirely inten­tional and part of what appears to make it so addictive to its fans.]

Share this post:

Possibly related:

• How to Make a Wise Crowd
• Stock Tip: Bet on Collective Intelligence
• Wisdom 2.0