Forum: Wise Decisions, Heuristics, and Leadership: Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki wrote a book entitled The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations in which he discussed under what circumstances groups tend to make better decisions that the individuals making up the group.

This idea has been taken up by a number of online forums, many of which have deliberately tried to shape their dynamics to match Surowiecki's criteria through technological means.  In particular a lot of work has been done on trust networks, that add metadata allowing the participant's opinions of each other's competance to be taken into account when weighing a collective decision.  [*1]

Does anyone have suggestions as to whether this forum ("Defining Wisdom") could benefit from some mechanism (beyond the existing taging mechanism) of categorising or rating users or posts.  If so, how it could or should be done?  And how would you see the resulting metadata being used to make the better/useful/insightful posts more accessible?  Could it do more than that, and actually produce better collective opinions from this site than produced by any individual poster (say, when combined with polls about the nature of wisdom)?

Douglas

[*1] For the mathematically inclined, have a look at this essay on the attack resistant trust metric metadata used by Advogato.

In my opinion, and from what I've seen, these advanced forms of tagging/rating users/posts (and in fact, even the existing tagging which is present here) is something that is really only beneficial when the number of users and posts has exceeded a certain threshold. Here's a good metric for determining if a forum has reached that particular threshold:

 Has anyone here used the tagging mechanism to find a post of interest to them that they otherwise wouldn't have found?

 If the answer to the above question is yes, for anyone here, with regard to this forum, I'd like to hear about it. The above question can also be generalized to deal with rating and the not only finding, but the ignoring, of items otherwise not of interest.