Crowd Size, Diversity and Performance

Crowds are increasingly being adopted to solve complex problems. Size and diversity are two key characteristics of crowds; however their relationship to performance is often paradoxical. To better understand the effects of crowd size and diversity on crowd performance we conducted a study on the quality of 4,317 articles in the WikiProject Film community. The results of our study suggest that crowd size leads to better performance when crowds are more diverse. However, there is a break-even point - smaller, less diverse crowds can outperform more diverse crowds of similar size. Our results offer new insights into the effects of size and diversity on the performance of crowds.