In 1907, Sir Francis Galton (Ref. 1) proposed that accumulated knowledge of a crowd is more accurate than individual predictions based on his observation of the raffle results of the annual West of England fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. In the raffle the participants have to accurately predict the butchered weight of a select ox. Galton has seen that the average weight of given by all the participants is much closer to the actual than even in prediction of the winner. Now Galton's idea is widely used in internet to choose the most popular Video, the use crowd sourced data to find quickest way to home. But many occasions these ideas seem to be clouded by the mind set of the majority of the persons and need not have to be true. In other words, the wisdom of the crowd can go wrong. The other suggests that such information gathered from the crowd need be subject to statistical analysis before accepting the result to avoid erroneous conclusions. (3 refs.)
展开▼
