Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom?

Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom?

Online recommendation systems can be distorted by a minority of users.

When searching online for a new gadget to buy or a movie to rent, many people pay close attention to the number of stars awarded by customer-reviewers on popular websites. But new research confirms what some may already suspect: those ratings can easily be swayed by a small group of highly active users.

Vassilis Kostakos, an assistant professor at the University of Madeira in Portugal and an adjunct assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), says that rating systems can tap into the "wisdom of the crowd" to offer useful insights, but they can also paint a distorted picture of a product if a small number of users do most of the voting.  Niki Kittur, an assistant professor at CMU who studies user collaboration on Wikipedia , says that providing more information about voting patterns to users could also be helpful. Kittur suggests that sites could create ways to easily summarize and represent other users' contributions to reveal any obvious biases.