It’s been noted that over 2009, Wikipedia lost over 49,000 editors. According to a study by Felipe Ortega, from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, the year prior saw a loss of only 4,900 editors. What does this mean? Are people losing interest in Wikipedia, one of the top 10 website in the world? Considering most students can no longer write a paper without citing Wikipedia, should we be alarmed? What if Wikipedia dies?

Wikipedia says it is nowhere near this. They point out that Mr. Ortega raises valid challenges for Wikipedia in the future, but his numbers are off. Details aside, how many editors does Wikipedia need at this point?

Back in 2001, Wikipedia needed content, but that was years ago. Now, everything you can think of has an entry. Is it possible that we simply don’t need as many editors any more? Perhaps the time has come for experts on different subjects to review and improve the content that is already there.

Whether there is a decline in editors, or the numbers are holding steady, we don’t see this as a negative sign for Wikipedia, we just think of it as an evolution. At almost ten years old, it is a great example of the wisdom of crowds and how that collective intelligence can be used. It will be interesting to see how the next few years unfold for Wikipedia.

Does what they see affect what you get with crowdsourced input?

To get truly valid data on crowd demand do you have to remove the risk of a popularity contest? That’s one of the common questions we get asked around crowdsourcing and voting.

To shed some light on this, we thought we’d share what we discussed with good friend Veer Gidwaney, Founder of Humanity Calls - a platform where crowds of people assemble online to evaluate charities and make donations to those organizations which perform best - set to launch early 2010.

Here’s what we’ve seen as the affects of transparency in the crowds we’ve worked with:

Crowd votes totally hidden

Pros

• Makes people think for themselves & eliminates group think
• Produces incredibly valuable data

Cons

• Seeing “group think” is interesting, engaging and can foster participation
• Without ranking of ideas/solutions into top voted, it can be overwhelming for people to sort through and parse items for voting

Vote totals shown, individual votes hidden

Pros

• Presenting highest vote listing engages crowd, gets them voting
• Crowd’s time gets focused on crowd-deemed highest quality ideas/solutions

Cons

• Biases crowd energy towards top voted ideas/solutions – other high potential ideas never get seen
• Earliest in ideas/solutions biased to get most votes

Individual votes and vote totals seen by all

Pros

• With full transparency, the amount of malicious votes drops dramatically
• Crowd has means to spot and report voting irregularities

Cons

• People swayed to vote for ideas/solutions by the most popular crowd members
• As with just showing vote totals – attention biased to top voted/earliest in ideas

So with limits on all voting models – how do you best limit bias? First, pick the model with the strengths best suited to your crowd and purpose. Second, consider other means to reduce the risk of bias:

• Broaden what’s filtered & presented: Would you get more useful results and participation displaying not only top voted, but most viewed, most commented or a random display of ideas and solutions?
• Get experts to aid in filtering: Might an expert panel reviewing all ideas and filtering to top ideas for a tournament get to the most valuable winning idea?
• Pace/Batch the voting: Consider weekly or monthly showdowns to keep the volume of ideas/solutions manageably viewable by the crowd– with a tournament of finalists at the end.

These are some of our best practices & lessons learned. What have you seen work to limit crowd bias in voting?

Thanks Veer for reaching out to us!

photo by: starbright31

Making a successful shift to open innovation requires some behavioural and attitude changes and new technology adoption, but when done right the rewards can be enormous.

We’ve worked on and studied dozens of crowdsourcing initiatives, and while we, and everyone involved with crowdsourcing, continue to learn on a daily basis, there are some emerging guiding principals that seem to lead to crowdsourcing success. On the surface, crowdsourcing seems easy – shout a question out to the crowd, get their ideas and allow them to vote on the best. But we’ve found that for true performance and profit driving results, you need to pay attention to these principals:

#1 - Right Purpose
Call to the crowd for insight you will act on

A little bit of time up front in planning out your Crowdsource campaign can dramatically increase the value you will derive from it. Just like in the early days of e-commerce, the companies that truly benefited from the online business shift were those that well conceived the potential of the technology applied to their business problems, market and organizational behaviors. For high ROI crowdsourcing you need to be clear on: What issues or opportunities facing your organization can a crowd answer for you? Where can you improve product development, R&D, policy development, your brand positioning or market research by adopting open innovation? And as important, who are the leaders in your organization that will champion and commit to acting on the input from the crowd. There is no law that says you have to implement what the crowd decides, but you need to be ready to acknowledge the crowd’s input and broadcast the action you are taking and why.
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We often talk about crowdsourcing for collective intelligence, or ideation. What about crowdsourcing for crowd production? Putting a call out to get a high volume of simple tasks done quickly and economically – even free. (more…)

For a business shift that’s about inviting in non-experts, hobbyists and hackers, there’s a lot of insider lingo around crowdsourcing. This begins the first of a series of straight talk on crowdsourcing principles to help us all put the theory into practice.

What is collective intelligence? Jeff Howe, the guy that came up with the term crowdsourcing, says it this way, “A central principle animating crowdsourcing is that the group contains more knowledge than individuals.” James Suroweicki says, “Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision.” This is the science that explains why when asked for a lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the crowd guesses 91% correctly, whereas experts have a 61% likelihood of getting the right answer. The answers that come from crowdsourcing are called collective intelligence or wisdom of crowds. Yes, two terms for the same thing.
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