ODP and wikipedia ain’t perfect - but neither is mortgaged to big business.

If Google’s algorithm has some sort of unintentional bias, there’s no way we’ll ever know because it’s a black box - we can’t see inside it, and we can’t see what it might be missing out.

If a group of underemployed people in LA, or even Liverpool la, are compiling search results, each will have their own bias, and the challenge is not eradicating that bias, but ensuring an even spread of bias so that it just cancels itself out overall.

This reminds me of voting. An error in an evoting machine causes a systemic miscount because the error is the same every time someone votes: if a vote for Jason goes to Euan, it will do so every time. With pencil and paper, the errors are human and variable, so someone might vote for Euan when they meant to vote for Jason, but the next person might make the error the other way round, and over all the vote is an accurate reflection of the will of the people.

Question is, can Mahalo be more like pen and paper than evoting?

I made my comment in the sense that steering a way through all the possible biases, many of them inadvertent, when you put the power to decide quality in the hands of a few people is non-trivial and in some ways takes us back into the world of conventional media which many of us are increasingly wary of.

RE Euan saying i’m naive, I’d rather be a naive optimist than a hopeless cynic.
best,

jason