USA Today technology columnist Kevin Maney sums up perfectly the Digg/Wikipedia debate we've been tossing around here, bringing in the "Wisdom of Crowds" terminology. Here's a sample:

So if a company can use the Net to tap the collected intelligence of its employees, the employees will make better decisions than the CEO. IBM, Google and others have tried this. Wikipedia, written and edited by tens of thousands of unpaid contributors, should be better than an encyclopedia written and edited by specialists. News sites such as Digg, which lets users vote stories to the front page, should surface the best stuff more effectively than professional editors.

Except it doesn't always work that way. Pointing specifically at Wikipedia, Lauren Weinstein of the People for Internet Responsibility says that the Net has propagated a "basic fallacy that a wisdom-of-crowds approach could ever work, even theoretically."

Bias alert: I've read and enjoyed Maney for some time, but I became a bigger fan after his skillful moderating of a Cato copyright panel in which I participated.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 12:43 PM | Free Culture Movement

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