Collective wisdom

There was a huge burst of traffic yesterday from Crooked Timber discussing the wisdom of crowds.  Someone linked to my Wikipedia posts here, so I return the favour.  As well as the posts on this blog, there is an article I wrote for the Skeptical Adversaria, of which a copy is on the web here. I have argued many times that crowdsourcing can work well for items of 'hard' knowledge - easily verifiable facts of the sort you would find in an almanac, scientific constants, domains subject to clear proof, such as mathematics.  For the humanities, and in general for any abstract subject that requires thoughtful summarisation, it is a disaster.  Enough said.