[lamontcg]

Another concern is that nearly every stackoverflow answer or wikipedia article that isn't a trivial algorithm tends to be buggy at its edge conditions. Most of them look like they were submitted by college students and not experts.

[shadowgovt]

Remember when we believed that experts were over because the wisdom of the crowds would reign supreme?

Been a hell of a decade, hasn't it.

[xpe]

The "wisdom of the crowds" doesn't mean what many people think it means.

The wisdom of crowds works best when:

1. participants are independent (otherwise you may get failure modes, such as "groupthink" or "information cascades")

2. participants are informed, but in different ways, with different opinions;

3. there is a clear, accepted aggregation mechanism, where individual errors "cancel out" to some degree

I view the topics in James Surowiecki's book (or the Wikipedia summary of it, at least) as required thinkinpg for everyone, preferably synthesized with a study of statistics and political economy.

In particular, the Wikipedia article's section on "Five elements required to form a wise crowd" is a slightly different slicing of the required elements that I offer above.

* If you read that section, trust is listed. I, however, don't see trust as a necessary condition for a "wise crowd". Trust is often useful (or even necessary) when a collective decision is used for governance, decision-making, and policy.

[TimTheTinker]

When the wisdom of the crowds is all easily accessible, the hard part becomes curating.