Wisdom of the Crowd

Wisdom of the crowd, also called wisdom of the majority, is the finding that the collective opinion of a diverse and independent group of individuals often yields a better judgment than that of any single expert within the group. The effect underlies platforms such as Quora, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, which rely on aggregating many individual contributions. It works because the idiosyncratic error, or noise, in each individual judgment tends to cancel out when many independent judgments are averaged together, leaving a more accurate collective estimate. Trial by jury is often cited as an example of the same principle at work outside the research literature, and studies have found that the aggregated answers of a large group to quantity estimation, general knowledge and spatial reasoning questions are frequently as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any one member of the group. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/