A crowd is not wise by itself. It becomes reliable when it runs a procedure that lets good contributions survive and removes bad ones cheaply, and it accumulates because writing something down somewhere alterable stops it slipping back. So the useful question is never how loud the launch was. It is whether the thing you added can be found and corrected by somebody you will never meet.
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Twenty-five years of Wikipedia, and the argument at the start that an encyclopedia anyone can edit could never work
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The annual fundraising banner and the economics behind it: a readership in the billions, a few hundred staff, no advertising and no owner
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The open forums as the other half of what taught machines to speak, and why that inheritance gets mentioned less
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Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation, on the fundamental attribution error and why a talk page defuses it by putting a source on the table instead of a person
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John Locke, the Epistle to the Reader of the Essay, on the under-labourer clearing the ground and removing some of the rubbish
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Alvin Goldman, social epistemology and reliability as a property of processes rather than of persons
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Aristotle, Politics III.11, on the feast that many contribute to, and the caveat he kept inside the sentence
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Michael Tomasello, the ratchet effect and why human innovations stop slipping back
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Antonio Machado, Proverbios y cantares XXIX: caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar
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The open question the chapter does not resolve: what is owed to the people whose unpaid work made these systems possible
THIS WEEK’S EXERCISE
Find one thing you know well that is written down wrong somewhere public.