Harnessing Collective Intelligence

March 8, 2010 Harnessing Collective Intelligence

According to O’Reilly (Nov 10 2006) harnessing collective intelligence is a basic principle in web 2.0; it is one of its essential elements. It is a highly effective method for creating valuable contents. Users can participate to add values and create architecture of participation that helps in collecting information from participants both implicitly and explicitly.

Web 2.0 provides social network platforms, such as friendship, collaboration, or information exchange, that help users to generate the content in a collaborative fashion. The knowledge created by a huge number of people through mass collaboration is called ‘collective intelligence’. It is also helpful in criticizing the contents and filters the valuable.

Companies that use web 2.0 understand how to harness the collective intelligence to make their systems better. A collective inelegance occurs when many participants connect to the system criticize its contents and filter the valuable.

Amazon is an example of how collective intelligence may be harnessed to gather the information explicitly and implicitly. Explicitly gathering occurs when user can rate he contents, upload images and add comments, and the implicitly comes when the company can use special software to observe and follow the customers and visitors to gain helpful information how they use the website.

Wikipedia is another example that relies on harnessing collective intelligence for creating its contents. It is one of the most popular web 2.0; it is a excellent example of a site that has succeeded in harnessing collective intelligence. It is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Everyone can add new articles, and these articles are editable, so it is acceptable to add new information or delete as well. It encourages people to collaborate to generate the web contents.

Wikipedia also has a discussions page attached to each article to provide your and get other people reflections. Moreover it has multilingual web-based, that makes it well-internationalized projects. Wikipedia content’ is available in many different languages, so people from different region can get the benefits and share the content creations.

Also, it is open source project, it is online encyclopedia, and it is written, edited and policed by a global group of volunteers. It exploits the user-generated content to offer its information database. According to O’Reilly (Nov 10 2006) when we compare Wikipedia with other web applications like encyclopedia Britannica, “Wikipedia exhibits super intelligent behavior when it is more comprehensive and more up to date than encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica has the brand, but Wikipedia has the Brains on Board. With very minimal software, Wikipedia directs millions of minds to create a new and better kind of encyclopedia. That’s not just user-generated content“. Britannica relies upon experts to create it contents; Wikipedia relies on trust in anonymous users to build the content, it is an adaptation of the open source.

Wikipedia is harnessing collective intelligence; it is user-generated and interactive content. It allows the people to publish their work, connect with each other, and exchange data with other sources, “two – way” of communication reading and writing, that is really harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain.

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