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Wisdom of the crowd, not
By Martin English | January 20, 2006
One of the memes of web 2.0 is the Wisdom of the crowd.? I’ve always been suspicious that the wisdom of the crowd is not always that wise.? A couple of weeks ago, an O’Reilly Network editor was accused of stealing Digg’s CSS pages.? Problem one is that this accusation was completely false.? Problem two, the real problem, is the matter of hundreds of
thousands of readers and thousands of active voters voting up the
article about how “O’Reilly writer Steve Mallett” is a thief and a
spammer.
This isn’t the first time at Digg.com where the mob mentality has taken over.? For example, at the time of writing, this digg.com search gave two stories; The first has over 2100 diggs, the latter has 20 or so.
The first is the outrage of the mob that loves the idea that Bush is evil and so assumes the story MUST be true. The retraction, in which the student admits he pulled it all out of his ass has gotten 20 diggs (over 2 weeks later).
Importantly, Digg makes no attempt to check the veracity and accuracy of any of these postings. Yes, the notion is that the other Digg readers will do the fact checking, but that notion is of dubious credibility and, in any case, happens after the fact, The time to check veracity and accuracy is prior to publication.
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