Haystack Blog

Wendy Ju, an interaction design researcher, writes: “Imagine, for a moment, a doorman who behaves as automatic doors do.  He does not acknowledge you when you approach or pass by.  He gives no hint the door can or will open — until you wander within six feet of the door, whereupon he flings the door [...]

We know that online collective intelligence can achieve incredible things — for example, the ESP Game, Wikipedia, Mechanical Turk.  But many of these systems assume that individuals make independent assumptions and that these judgments can be aggregated.  Neither of these are true in Wikipedia, where “truth” is generated through an intense combination of coordination and [...]