Yesterday, I came across an interesting Peta Pixel: Why You Shouldn’t Give Too Much Weight Too Anonymous Online Critics, and it got me thinking.
Briefly, here’s what what the the post was about:
In 2006 a guy name André Rabelo submitted the photo below to group called DeleteMe!, where members of the group vote on photos to rate their quality. The photo was quickly voted down. The kicker was, it was a photo taken by a famous photographer named Henri Cartier-Bresson from 1932, which was sold at an auction in 2008 for $265,000.
But wait.. I thought this group said it was not good??
What André did is essentially an exercise in Crowdsourcing, which is group problem solving and is often done online. It can be used in areas such as software development, mining, research and as well as translation.
My question: Is the key here that they were “anonymous” voters, or is crowd sourcing not as intelligent as we hope? Or is crowdsourcing really the ultimate test of quality? What do you think?
