Interesting theory on how people tend to resist the wisdom of crowds effect because of “culturally embedded religious belief”. The authors goes into details about how intuition makes us miss the point. Wikipedia’s greatness does not depend on edit quality, but on edit selection.

The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is […] is not due to the average quality of the edits […], it is due to a much harder to observe process: selection. Some edits survive, while others quickly die. While one can look at the history of a Wikipedia article and see each and every edit, it is much harder to tell how many potential editors looked at an article, subconsciously thought “I doubt I could improve this much,” and chose not to try. Each of these can be considered a “selection event”, and the number of such events vastly outnumbers the actual edits. Selection is the heart of what makes Wikipedia — as well as Darwinian evolution — work.

Link

Just like in Darwin’s theories, success of crowd sourced systems is achieved by turning “countless random mutations into sophistication”. Perfection helps the process, but it is in no way a mandatory condition. And that is the part our Cartesian brains have a hard time understanding.

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