The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse and independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Quora, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources which rely on collective human knowledge. An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.
Sir Francis Galton by Charles Wellington Furse, given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1954
In governance, sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors using a random representative sample.
A kleroterion in the Ancient Agora Museum (Athens)
USCAR Court select juries by sortition
Drawing straws within a small group: one of four matches is broken to be shorter than the others, and the four are presented to the group to draw from, the chooser of the short match being selected