Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That depends on the specific situation. I would submit to you that it would perhaps be unwise to have papers submitted to scientific journals peer-reviewed by a crowd of random strangers, for example.
|
Oh, I totally agree that crowdsourcing has more or less juice depending on the situation. However, I would note that science can definitely benefit from it in some circumstances. For instances, there's an article
here Science News about a computer science problem that spontaneously became a crowdsourced research project. Crowdsourced peer review probably doesn't make sense in most cases because so few people will have relevant knowledge, but I think the peer review process could benefit by making the whole process transparent.
As far as Amazon reviews, the validity of the review certainly increases where there are more reviews. However, the problem of paid reviews is probably much lower in the case of a crowdsourced review system because you can't buy off everyone.