Another concern is that nearly every stackoverflow answer or wikipedia article that isn't a trivial algorithm tends to be buggy at its edge conditions. Most of them look like they were submitted by college students and not experts.
The "wisdom of the crowds" doesn't mean what many people think it means.
The wisdom of crowds works best when:
1. participants are independent (otherwise you may get failure modes, such as "groupthink" or "information cascades")
2. participants are informed, but in different ways, with different opinions;
3. there is a clear, accepted aggregation mechanism, where individual errors "cancel out" to some degree
I view the topics in James Surowiecki's book (or the Wikipedia summary of it, at least) as required thinkinpg for everyone, preferably synthesized with a study of statistics and political economy.
In particular, the Wikipedia article's section on "Five elements required to form a wise crowd" is a slightly different slicing of the required elements that I offer above.
* If you read that section, trust is listed. I, however, don't see trust as a necessary condition for a "wise crowd". Trust is often useful (or even necessary) when a collective decision is used for governance, decision-making, and policy.
