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/