According to Wikipedia, the wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.
We’ll take the results of a YouTube video as an example, to test the wisdom of the crowd. I used Majk’s Show as a dataset. It’s a young local guy that interviews random people on the streets, asking them random questions.
We will agree that any hits above 50% will validate the wisdom of the crowd. Follows a table with results:
| Question | Answer | Correct answers (%) | Valid? |
| How do you pronounce “schedule” | sheh·jool or skeh·jool | 13/34 = 38.23% | No |
| Who’s the man on the picture | Albert Einstein | 14/32 = 43.75% | No |
| 8/2(2+2)=? | 16 | 11/25 = 44% | No |
| What’s closer, America or the Moon? | America | 9/22 = 40.9% | No |
| Who was the first president of Macedonia? | Kiro Gligorov | 22/50 = 44% | No |
| What is larger: -4 or -10? | -4 | 20/36 = 55.55% | Yes |
We can further categorize the questions and see where the wisdom of the crowd fails specifically. For example, English seems to be below 40% while everything else is above 40%.
In any case, I think I might have set a bit high grading point for the citizens of my country 🙂 But at least they seem to know how to compare two numbers!
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