This blog entry at the Crowdsourcing blog, which ‘monitors the rise of the amateur’, reviews some recent studies that confirm that peer production is mostly the result, not of an amorphous wisdom of crowds process, but of the core role of the lead passionate producers.

Interestingly, he then contrasts crowdsourcing with what I would call non-reciprocal peer production, making an important distinction that often gets overlooked.

Excerpt:

“If instead of focusing on the size of your crowd, you focus on your core contributors, the content of these users can support 10,000 (mostly non-contributing) readers. How does this happen? I believe that it’s the exceptional intelligence and wisdom of the passionate that is able support strong readerships. (Not the mediocre intelligence, and wisdom of crowds)

How does the trend of crowdsourcing fit in to this model? Well, crowdsourcing involves paying (often very small amounts of money) for the content produced by crowds of people. This model does not likely lead to exceptional content by passionate people, but rather acceptable content by people motivated largely by money. This type of content, I believe, does not support the readership ratios seen in Wikipedia and digg, and you can verify this by visiting some sites that are known to crowdsource (without mentioning any names).

I put it out to you, that instead of budgetting for crowdsourcing, your money would be better spent catering to your 1% of passionate users. How do you that?”