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.]