There is a fairly substantial literature on crowdsourcing methods
Ifthe implicit claim is that crowd sourcing methods and their limitations arepoorly understood, this seems incorrect. I am aware, for instance, of a non-negligiblebody of mathematical literature on the conditions under, and extent to, which variousmethods for aggregating the judgments of a group of individuals would reliablyproduce accurate outputs. See forinstance the recent work on the so called Condorcet Jury Theorem (Grofman et al1983, Ladha 1992, List & Goodin 2002; full references available on request).There is also a considerable empirical literature on the performance of so-calledprediction markets (see Servan-Schreiber’s contribution to Landemore andElster’s recent Collective Wisdomvolume for some references).