Or that Google had the wrong Interstate 64 for two years (and the navigation database people are going on 3 years now and have yet to correct it). Or has over 40 cooling centers in the wrong location in St Louis County (which they won’t correct, because not enough people will validate the corrections).

There have been several case studies demonstrating that given two groups, one paid and not paid but interested, the volunteers get better data.

Yep, that’s right. One bad actor would spoil the results, provided you don’t weight and evaluate the voices. When enough people comment and vote in the same space, on the same subject, about the same issue, from very different sources…then you get a crowd. And oddly enough, with enough folks looking at the same issue, the statistical difference between their comments is remarkably narrow. Everyone’s a critic, right?

Any good crowd-sourced mapping app has a human in the loop somewhere to validate and check results. But instead of looking at every issue, the folks who run these apps take the mean from the well-populated responses, and assign weight to those items where only one or a few folks are contributing. They may decide to ignore the comment, or if it’s within a certain distance from a specific reference area where items receive greater priority, then that “one point” will get a look.

This is how Google does it. Oh, and how the navigation database folks do it as well. What did you think happened with your position every time you turned on your wireless-enabled PND and asked for a traffic update? Or every time you got a position fix, regardless.

If you use a navigation system, the chances are very, very good you’re driving on crowd-sourced data. Almost a 100% in Europe, and less so in the USA. Those feedback loops are in almost all of the new generation devices…which have been driving around the Continent for some years, and started appearing here in the last year or so.

I shudder to think what it must be like to be a streets database company with your head in the sand and NOT leveraging the incredible power of the crowds. Logically, of course. So you don’t take the word of someone who’s masking their true identity and posing as someone else, for instance.

Methinks this is much ado about nothing.