Wisdom of the crowd

The wisdom of the crowd refers to the process of taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert to answer a question. This process, while not new to the information age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources that rely on human opinion. The process, in the business world at least, was written about in detail by James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds.