page_title: Wisdom of the crowd
section_title: Examples
hierarchical_section_title: Wisdom of the crowd / Examples
caption_attribution_description: Sir Francis Galton, by Charles Wellington Furse (died 1904), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1954. See source website for additional information. This set of images was gathered by User:Dcoetzee from the National Portrait Gallery, London website using a special tool. All images in this batch have been confirmed as author died before 1939 according to the official death date listed by the NPG.
context_page_description: The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Quora, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources that rely on collective human knowledge. An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.
  Trial by jury can be understood as at least partly relying on wisdom of the crowd, compared to bench trial which relies on one or a few experts. In politics, sometimes sortition is held as an example of what wisdom of the crowd would look like. Decision-making would happen by a diverse group instead of by a fairly homogenous political group or party. Research within cognitive science has sought to model the relationship between wisdom of the crowd effects and individual cognition.
context_section_description: Aristotle is credited as the first person to write about the "wisdom of the crowd" in his work titled Politics. According to Aristotle, "it is possible that the many, though not individually good men, yet when they come together may be better, not individually but collectively, than those who are so, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man's cost".
  The classic wisdom-of-the-crowds finding involves point estimation of a continuous quantity. At a 1906 country fair in Plymouth, 800 people participated in a contest to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the median guess, 1207 pounds, was accurate within 1% of the true weight of 1198 pounds. This has contributed to the insight in cognitive science that a crowd's individual judgments can be modeled as a probability distribution of responses with the median centered near the true value of the quantity to be estimated.
  In recent years, the "wisdom of the crowd" phenomenon has been leveraged in business strategy and advertising spaces. Firms such as Napkin Labs aggregate consumer feedback and brand impressions for clients. Meanwhile, companies such as Trada invoke crowds to design advertisements based on clients' requirements.
  Non-human examples are prevalent.  For example, the Golden Shiner is a fish that prefers shady areas.  The single Shiner has a very difficult time finding shady regions in a body of water whereas a large group is much more efficient at finding the shade.
caption: Sir Francis Galton by Charles Wellington Furse, given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1954
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