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Home/Magazine Archive/December 2009 (Vol. 52, No. 12)/Crowdsourcing and the Question of Expertise/Abstract

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Crowdsourcing and the Question of Expertise

By David Roman
Communications of the ACM, December 2009, Vol. 52 No. 12, Page 12
10.1145/1610252.1610258
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crowd of people — Photo by Pablo Twose Vall

There is an in inherent weakness to crowdsourcing that should bother computer scientists and computer users alike. It's the fact there is no clear difference between "the wisdom of the crowd" and "the mob that rules." What's missing is a measure of discernment.

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Comments

Rick Mouritzen

January 12, 2010 02:29

I suppose another way to think about this is the wisdom of crowds is a collection of educated guesses while crowdsourcing degrades to a collection of uninformed opinions.

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