I found this article very interesting as it highlights circumstances when the wisdom of crowds may be beneficial, other circumstances when it is not useful and examples of situations where it should have been used and was not.

An interesting point that the article discusses is that not all crowds are wise and in fact, crowds such as mobs and stock market bubbles may create negative outcomes (The Wisdom of Crowds, 2010).
The article suggests that in order to successfully utilize the wisdom of crowds, individuals of a group must be diverse of opinion, independent, decentralized and have some method to combine these independent ideas (The Wisdom of Crowds, 2010).

I was surprised to see the article referenced Wikipedia as a bad example for the wisdom of crowds suggesting "subject matter experts can be overruled and even wrongly punished by less knowledgeable persons in systems like Wikipedia" which "have less well defined means of pooling knowledge" (The Wisdom of Crowds, 2010).

In most of my own research I found articles that in some way supported Wikipedia's use of crowd wisdom. For example "The More, The Wikier" and "Wikipedia: Organisation from a Bottom-up Approach" suggest that Wikipedia does in fact successfully utilizes the wisdom of crowds through a large and diverse author base utilizing a system of bottom-up organisation.

Overall I found the article was a good overview of the wisdom of crowds.

Reference:

Ball, P. (2007, February 27). The more, the wikier. Nature: International weekly journal of Science. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com

Jaap van den Herik, H., Postma, E., & Spek, S. (2006). Wikipedia: organisation from a bottom-up approach. Maastricht University. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0611068v2.pdf

The Wisdom of Crowds. (2010). Received from http://www.icepredict.com/rsrc/files/wisdomofcrowds.pdf

I I found this article a very useful and informative resource. In my own research on Wikipedia, I was particularly interested to read about the reasons why people contribute to the encyclopedia given that authors seem to receive no direct credit for their contributions.
In one of the articles I researched it claimed that editors are motivated by the "rush of joy" they received when contributing their unique wisdom to an audience of 300 million people (Manjoo, 2009). In other words Wikipedia benefits from the emotion of its contributors.
A year ago in one of my Net Comm. classes we were challenged to make a valuable contribution to a Wikipedia article. My contribution was minute and fairly insignificant yet I still felt a sense of pride and brag about my (tiny) contribution to anyone who will listen today.

From this article my understanding is that there are two main reason as to why Wikipedia authors contribute their time and effort: one, they feel compelled to help create an encyclopedia that is perceived as being a reliable resource adopting a mainstream view of classless knowledge production, or two, seek pride, ownership and credit for their contributions which can be acknowledged indirectly through Wikipedia technology (Bruckman & Forte, n.d.).

Reference:

Bruckman, A, & A. Forte. (n.d). Why do people write for Wikipedia? Incentives to contribute to open-content publishing. Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing. Retrieved from http://jellis.org/work/group2005/papers/forteBruckmanIncentivesGroup.pdf

Manjoo, F. (2009, September 28). Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success? Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine

A very interesting article that I believe presents a good basic understanding of the topic however being a Wordpress blog I would argue that it may not be a perfectly reliable or an unbiased source of information.

I personally find the topic of Kony 2012 incredibly interesting for its revolutionary use of social networking and crowdsourcing.
While my personal option is that the campaign itself is full of flaws, I agree with the article's point that "what is undeniable is the integral role that social media played in the campaign" and that the campaign "is a great template for the mobilization of people using social media and social networking systems" (Emenanjo, 2012).

According to the article by Emenanjo (2012), Kony 2012 is an example of the power and strength of crowds; in my research I explored how Wikipedia utilizes the wisdom of crowds. Both Wikipedia and the Kony 2012 campaign are examples of how crowds can be potentially useful in achieving great things that an individual could not.
This comment by Noam Cohen of the New York Times suggests this relationship between the Kony 2012 campaign and Wikipedia:

"[w]e are entering an age when the shallow political power of the public - including those too young to vote - will increasingly help shape our policy debates. And yes, that is scary to professional foreign policy experts, much in the same way reference book authors with graduate degrees were rattled by the idea of an online encyclopedia created collectively by amateurs."

I anticipate that Kony 2012 was the "trial" and the Internet will soon be flooded with similar movements attempting to utilize social networking to gain support for their own campaign.

Reference:

Emenanjo, O. (2012, March 13). Kony 2012: The Template for Effective Crowdsourcing? [Web log post] Retrieved from http://stipcommunia.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/kony-2012-the-template-for-effective-crowdsourcing/

Manjoo, F. (2009, September 28). Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success? Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success? is an article which suggests Wikipedia's achievement level has reached its peak and eventually will see its downfall. The article looks in depth at the potential causes for Wikipedia's slowing growth and how these elements could possibly lead to the community's eventual failure. It suggests one reason for Wikipedia's decelerating growth rate is simply that "the site has hit the natural limit of knowledge expansion" and the only possible remaining contributions are obscure topics and "janitorial" editing job such as formatting and fixing grammar. The article claims "Wikipedia's natural resource is emotion" and editors are motivated by the "rush of joy" they receive when contributing their unique wisdom to an audience of 300 million people. What this means is that as the need for significant edits diminishes, so too does participation enthusiasm. Additionally, as Wikipedia has grown, so too has the bureaucracy and complex laws of Wikipedia, resulting in a community that has become unwelcoming to novice Wikipedians. The article discusses how Wikipedia editors are made up of a narrow class of participants dominated by young males from wealthy countries and academic backgrounds. The Wikipedia author-base is not as broad and diverse as first thought and it seems "the encyclopedia is missing the voices of people in developing countries, women and experts in various specialties that have traditionally been divorced from tech". This too is given as a reason for Wikipedia's imminent downfall.

Kittur, A., & Kraut, R. (2008). Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds in Wikipedia: Quality Through Coordination. Carnegie Mellon University. Retrieved 2012, March 19th from http://kraut.hciresearch.org/sites/kraut.hciresearch.org/files/articles/Kittur08-WikipediaWisdomOfCrowds_CSCWsubmitted.pdf Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds in Wikipedia: Quality Through Coordination is a study that looks into "the critical importance of coordination in effectively harnessing the "wisdom of the crowds" in online production environments". The article suggests that Wikipedia's success is reliant on significant and varied coordination from its users and not just determined by a large and diverse author-base as proposed in other studies (Arazy, Morgan, Ofer, Patterson, Raymond & Wayne, 2006). Elements such as editor(s) coordination methods, article lifecycle, and task interdependence determine whether a large author-base will be effective or counteractive in achieving high Wikipedia entry quality. The study found that unspoken expectations and a shared understanding (implicit coordination) between authors encouraged positive results when collaborating with a large author-base however more editors promoted a negative effect on article quality when using direct communication and verbal planning (explicit coordination). During the early stages of article development, both implicit and explicit coordination tend to promote content quality because author(s) need to establish structure, direction and scope of the article. For these high-coordination tasks, the study found it was more beneficial to have a small or core group of editors to set direction and as the article became more established, value can be maximized by distributing low-coordination tasks, such as fixing grammar, correcting vandalism and creating links, to a larger author-base.

Ball, P. (2007, February 27). The more, the wikier. Nature: International weekly journal of Science. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com The More, The Wikier is an article published on Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science, which explores the secret behind the quality of Wikipedia entries when anyone, anywhere has the ability to write and edit content. The article looks at three groups of researchers who "claim to have untangled the process by which many Wikipedia entries achieve their impressive accuracy". Wikipedia is an organisation in which users collaborate their knowledge to create an encyclopedia of information. "The percentage of edits made by the Wikipedia 'élite' of administrators" is steadily declining and "Wikipedia is now dominated by users who are much more numerous than the elite but individually less active." "The wisdom of the crowds" principle suggests that the combined knowledge of a large and diverse group is superior to the knowledge of a few experts. Ball explains that content accuracy and quality of Wikipedia articles is related to a high number of edits by a large number of users. For example, articles that deal with very topical issues receive a higher level of attention from a large and diverse audience and therefore are of higher quality than articles that are not as topical and thus do not attract the same attention. The three research groups referenced in the article are: Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman of Hewlett Packard's research laboratories who studied how a high number of edits by a large number of users create the 'best' Wikipedia articles, Aniket Kittur of the University of California, and co-workers who explored how the Wiki community has evolved from a small governing group to a democracy, and Ofer Arazy and colleagues at the University of Alberta who discuss the importance of this diversification of Wikipedia contributors to the overall success of its articles.

Jaap van den Herik, H., Postma, E., & Spek, S. (2006). Wikipedia: organisation from a bottom-up approach. Maastricht University. Retrieved 2012, March 19th from http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0611068v2.pdf The article Wikipedia: organisation from a bottom-up approach is a study into Wikipedia as a successful self-managing team via the analysis of the Dutch Wikipedia. The study explores how Wikipedia successfully creates a cohesive and logical data structure through bottom-up organisation in which labour division is autonomous. The article suggests that this bottom-up structure, with many contributors working towards a common goal, enables greater speed and efficiency subsequently allowing Wikipedia to update new developments faster than other encyclopedias. Additionally this structure, coupled with the online nature of the information network, encourages more communication and cooperation between divisions, increased enthusiasm in participants, and decreased managerial overheads. In terms of Wikipedia's content organisation, a sample study of Wikipedia articles demonstrated article clustering, scale-freeness, and potentially even small-worldliness indicating that Wikipedia's content is itself an organised network. Finally the article looks into the varying Wikipedia pieces and author types and analyzes their relationship. The study found that articles which receive a low average of edits per author (average of edits = number of edits on an article divided by the number of unique authors on the same article) in general "deal with topic areas that most people have at least some expertise in, or topic areas that everyone claims to know about". Contrastingly articles with a high average of edits per author were generally more specialized topics. What this means is that articles, which cover mainstream topics, attract a larger and more diverse crowd of authors (