Mass Analysis

= type of Mass-collaborative Science, in which large numbers of people take a look at a set of data to try to find mistakes or hidden details

Description

Jamais Cascio:

" Mass Analysis, in which large numbers of people take a look at a set of data to try to find mistakes or hidden details. His best example of this is the NASA Clickworkers project, which used a large group of volunteers to look at maps of Mars in order to identify craters. It turned out that the collective crater identification ability of volunteers given a small amount of training was as good as the best experts in the field. Ball links this directly to the James Surowiecki book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which argues that the collective decision-making power of large groups can be surprisingly good. WorldChanging's Nicole Boyer has mentioned The Wisdom of Crowds in a couple of her essays, most notably this week's The Wisdom of Google's Experiment. The ability of groups to act collectively to analyze and generate information is one of the drivers of collaborative efforts such as Wikipedia -- any individual contributor won't be an expert on everything, but the collected knowledge of the mass of authors is unbeatable." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001090.html)