Talk:Collective intelligence

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The entire political sense of collective intelligence has been removed, despite a mainstream politician (Al Gore) using it in just this sense. This is censorship, period. I request that you put some element of the material regarding political parties and constitutions as organizing collective action back in, as its removal seems simply to validate the narrowly technical views.

In opposition to the above, I state that technical views are anything but narrow. They are, in fact, quite useful in getting a deep understanding of CI.

Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz researched online Collective Intelligence starting in 1986. Their measure was obtained by comparing the group problem solution with the best individual solution in the group. See http://www.wikiworld.com/wiki/index.php/CollectiveIntelligence


Contents

[edit] Needs renaming

The most prominent opponent of 'Collective Intelligence' was a presumably little known individual called Albert Einstein. Oh, hes the one turning in his grave right now due to the idiotic naming of this phenomenon. If there is any chance that the hideous oxymoron 'Collective Intelligence' could be renamed to, say, 'Consensus' or 'Collective Processing' or more aptly 'Collective Infinite Stupidity', please make it so. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.65.242.154 (talk) 11:23, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Needs wikification

This needs to be split into sections for easier reading/scanning. It probably could also stand to be "tightened up" a bit (i.e., edited), but maybe that's just the impression I got from scanning through the 16 paragraphs with no section breaks. - dcljr (talk) 04:46, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I've had a bash at trying to sort it into slightly more managable chunks, but as I don't know a lot about this subject, I'm reluctant to do any more drastic editing!

In particular, the paragraphs that I put under "general concepts" don't make a lot of sense to me. Perhaps they should be edited, re-written or discarded by somebody who understands this topic.

At first glance, the French version of the page appears to be much better written and structured, with more interesting real-world examples. Here's a rough translation of the headings, just to give you a flavour:

  1. 1 Definition
   * 1.1 Charactistics of collective systems
  1. 2 Natural collective intelligence
   * 2.1 Migrating birds
   * 2.2 Ants: a natural model for resolving distributed problems
         o 2.2.1 Task division
               + 2.2.1.1 Mechanisms of task division
         o 2.2.2 The shortest path
   * 2.3 Termites and self-assembly (uncompleted)
  1. 3 Artificial collective intelligence

Perhaps it would be worth translating some of this for the English version? I could do it if necessary. Please contact me if you would find it useful.

Orangejon 03:05, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] SOX and CI

Where I work Sarbanes-Oxley is being taken to mean shut off access to everything, lock down the Internet. And I'm just wondering if there are any thoughts on how that affects the value of a company's collective intelligence, should a shareholder worry if the collective Intelligence is growing increasingly blind.

[edit] Important page-can I help?

I admire Tom Atlee very much and consider Collective Intelligence to be one of the core concepts for restoring democracy in America and elsewhere. If there is anything I can do to help here, please just give me guidance. I will be at the meeting in Boston next month. Would love to get together with folks interested in Collective Intelligence and/or Open source intelligence Robert Steele 20:25, 5 July 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Emergent consciousness and Cartesian Dualism

This article presupposes the truth of emergent conciousness and consequently the falsehood of Cartesian dualism:"Your conciousness _is_..." etc. ~~(unsigned)

It seems like the article is talking mainly about 'intelligence' as opposed to 'consciousness'. But even so, why shouldn't the emergent phenomenon be 'real', or exist? Paxfeline 13:16, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Alternative Meaning: Collective Intelligence in Computer-Based Collaboration?

Somebody deleted this note so I am posting it again in case that was an accident I am familiar with this book by John Smith: Collective Intelligence in Computer-Based Collaboration (published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 1995). In it, Smith outlines his theory of collective intelligence as the information processes that groups undertake to transform intangible knowledge (private and shared) into tangible knowledge (instrumental and target) aided by ephemeral knowledge (information in between tangible and intangible that is destroyed or lost after brief periods of use and not included within the final target artifact). Do you think that a section on this work would be relevant in this page? Jsarmi 20:23, 29 March 2007 (UTC) Repost: Jsarmi 15:53, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Politics

This article consistently brings up politics, which seems not very relevant to the topic. Could use a lot more citations and less POV. Dreamer.redeemer 06:06, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This article needs more...a lot more.

I find it extremely ironic that Wikipedia itself is perhaps one of the best examples of 'Collective Intelligence' online, yet it is not even mentioned as one of the examples of CI. In fact, some of the things that first come to my mind when I think of CI are not at all emphasized here. I truly feel - especially in this very environment - that more information and discussion concerning online CI (such as wiki and open source communities) should be included. Further discussion and ideas should also be raised concerning the implications of online CI and what this truly means to people in the grand scheme of things. The majority of this article portrays CI as a positive thing...but what about its negative implications? For every piece of information that a user freely generates online, huge corporations such as Google, Yahoo!, and others, along with governments, are watching us. What do they do with this information? Is our CI possibly giving these establishments more centralized control? How is this information we share being used to exploit us? After considering all this, can CI really be considered 'intelligent'? What does that even mean in this sense?

I truly hope that further discussion can be generated around these questions in order to develop better content for this article. In our current time, CI is an extremely important issue, and right now I don't feel this article is doing it justice. Wikipedia epitomizes the idea of CI, yet ironically is doing a terrible job in actually saying much about it all.

IntelligenceGirl (talk) 06:32, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Pure speculation. Unreferenced claims, such as this speculation, have no place in articles, and since the talk page is for discussing changes to the article, this discussion should hardly be here. I'll give you a chance to read this and will then delete it in a couple days. Thanks, Slartibartfast1992 22:35, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
Sure, I can understand that you might assume all my questions and claims are "pure speculation", yet I can, in fact, reference several sources that discuss many issues that I have brought up. As I am new to the Wikipedia community, I thought it best to attempt to generate some discussion before trying to contribute to the actual article. Of course, I wish to maintain the integrity and veracity of the article and simply feel that for such a broad and loaded topic as this, the article is lacking in many ways. I'd like to help contribute to a topic that interests me. That is all.

IntelligenceGirl (talk) 06:55, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Show those sources, if you have them, here on the tlk page. But I find it highly unlikely that Wikipedia would be considered a collective intellingence because of its basic failure to comply with the meaning of "collective intelligence"; it should be a group of people whose minds are somehow linked, therefore, a mind between many, or a collective intelligence. --Slartibartfast1992 21:53, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

How can Wikipedia not be considered an example of CI? It was mentioned that CI 'should be a group of people whose minds are somehow linked'. Are our minds not linked through the contributions we're making toward this article? Each article that is constructed is an example of CI. Any content that is generated by a group of users could be considered an example of CI. I can understand how this might deviate from more traditional definitions of CI that cite examples concerning 'swarm theory' or things of that nature, but about 70% of research I've uncovered for CI specifically discusses online content as a major form of CI. It's important for this article to acknowledge the new meanings that CI is taking on with the advent of online technology. Several sources I've been investigating refer to online intelligence as collective intelligence as well, and actually cite Wikipedia and Google as the best examples of this (see "Tapping into the Wisdom of Crowds" by Richard Naish, [1], "Mass Intelligence" by James Surwiecki [2], "The Power of Us" by Richard D. Hof [3], and "Collective Intelligence" by Michael Castelluccio [4], . Also, "Wikinomics" a book by Don Tapscott [5] also refers to Wikipedia, Open Source communities, etc. as collective intelligence created through mass collaboration, and MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence can provide more insight into this entire issue [6]. On another note, I've been looking into the Wikipedia article for "Collaborative Intelligence" [[7]] and am not sure I see the difference between collective intelligence and collaborative intelligence. The article seems to imply that collaborative intelligence is specific to web/online activity - which is something that is not touched on very well in this article, though should be. I'm thinking that perhaps this article should incorporate the "Collaborative Intelligence" article to emphasize how new technologies provide masses with better platforms for collaboration and how this results in important entities such as Google, Wikipedia, Last.fm, and other online resources where all information is user-generated.

I recognize that throwing a bunch of resources out here might be too much at once, but I'd be happy to break it all down as well as add more "academic" research that I found in journals accessed through online databases - which unfortunately cannot be accessed without a user account. Before I did, though, I wanted to get some input concerning expanding upon the definition of CI to include examples of online CI and everything that surrounds this loaded topic. Thanks. IntelligenceGirl (talk) 20:40, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Avoid self reference

This article contains self references, which it's not supposed to do: Wikipedia:Avoid self-references. I'm posting this here because this is likely to come up often - since wikipedia is an obvious subject for this article, it is necessary to watch out for this. It's OK to talk about wikipedia, you just have to make sure it's written in such a way that if the article was in print, or some other website it still makes sense. Ariel. (talk) 09:25, 17 January 2008 (UTC)