The Wisdom of Crowds

https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706#customerReviews

Ex. avarage of county fair guesses of dressed meat weight was one pound off.

Ex. Stock of o-ring company went down 12% compared to 3% of others on day 1, but only 6 months later did the experts identify the o-ring as the cause.

Would be good to study to understand conditions under which crowd guesses are accurate. Would this be on any topic? Ex, how do we extract 'wisdom of crowds' for a complex question such as 'how do we end corruption' etc? How do we form an answerable question, how do we interpret the results accurately? What is the state of art on such interpretation, ie, how to weigh answers? There must be a whole field of study for this outside of just counting and saying 'the crowd says this.' Can we get a better answer by appropriate weighing of answers, and do such formulas exist? How to create such formulas? What are the existing, open source algorithms that can help here?