The Lack Of Wisdom Of Crowds
I've always been suspicious of the idea that there is greater wisdom in crowds.
In my experience, the larger the group, the more idiotic the decision making. The heard mentality frequently leads to banal, populist blandness, which is not to say that search algos are a waste of time, but it is curious that any intervention by human editors is often portrayed as a negative - a failure of mathematics. The irony is that the goal for search algo developers is to produce code that will work like the brain of the average librarian.
Nicolas Carr puts it well: " As we adapt to the internet, we may just learn to forget that an algorithm, no matter how elegantly conceived, is no substitute for a person, and that a crowd, no matter how full of "wisdom," is no substitute for an editor.
But I hope we don't."
