crowdsourcing

The other night I gave a speech at the John Siegenthaler Center at Vanderbilt University in which I urged the new-media workshop students to look something up on Wikipedia, which is, of course, infallible. That drew a good laugh. Siegenthaler, unfortunately, wasn't appearing until later in the week, so I couldn't tease directly.

I think this is fascinating: GalaxyZoo.org is asking volunteers to look at pictures of the sky and scientifically classify entire galaxies. Spiral? Elliptical? Clockwise? Anticlockwise? It turns out the human eye and the human brain are much better at this sort of thing than any currently available technology.

But isn't science about precision? But what if they're wrong? My bet is that the underlying system relies on the establishment of a consensus.