Tapping crowd wisdom

I subscribed to MIT Technology Review and I found the following very interesting article about questions and answers services available on the web.

It appears that Yahoo Answers is best at tapping the wisdom of the crowd, which is based on a rule that everybody knows a lot about something, and that knowledge can be useful to someone else.

In XX century you became a professor when you published a lot in refereed journals, wrote several books, spent time coaching future PhDs. On the oldest QandA service, AnswerBag you become a professor when your answers to posted questions are ranked very high.

I just cannot stop thinking how different XXI century will be from XX century, and that old generation (one that keep all political jobs) fails to understand these changes.