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One of the inherent virtues of the Web is the greatest expansion of free speech in history. Distinctive voices, such as those of insightful bloggers, simply cannot be stifled. And you don’t even need to go to the trouble of regularly posting several hundred words of prose in order to be heard. Anyone who can count to 140 can tweet, and rare is the tweet that goes unanalyzed. The Web provides each of us with the opportunity to praise or damn, review, promote, join innumerable discussion threads, and comment on the content of others with a short invective or reasoned discourse.

Amid the apparent cacophony of all this simultaneous speech, there are innumerable groupings—audiences and points of view—which express the wisdom of their particular crowd. The more unfettered such speech is, the more authentic it seems; and the more authentic a window into the soul of the crowd it seems, the more valuable it is to those who wish to please, convert, flatter, or sell to the crowd.

Much is gained by this development and the inability of any monopoly, state or corporate, to control it so far. Witness Google’s principled stand against the China state monopoly. Without suggesting this freedom be trammeled, it is fair to ask whether the Web will develop a taste for higher standards of evidence, citation, sourcing, vetting, and transparency than it does today.

One depressing report, “Magazines and Their Web Sites” was published this March. This Columbia Journalism study surveyed magazine websites, and the results expose some extremely lax journalistic standards. Its authors, Victor Navasky and Evan Lerner, used an Abt SRBI market survey of 665 consumer magazines and their websites (22% of the 3,000 approached) and demonstrate that many of the basic standards of good journalism, including fact checking, copy editing, and transparency of sources, have been relaxed—or in some cases, abandoned altogether.

For online editions of magazines, copy editing is less rigorous 59% of the time when compared to print editions, and not done at all 11% of the time (p.14). These sloppy practices do not improve with size or experience. Indeed, the bigger and more profitable the publication the less likely they are to copy edit (p. 17).

Fact checking also falls short. The survey revealed that less rigorous fact-checking is tolerated 27% of the time for online editions, and 8% of the time there is no fact checking at all. Perhaps most startling of all is the revelation that another 8% of the time there is no fact checking done in either online or print editions (p. 16). Once again, the bigger and more profitable the site, the less rigorous the fact checking standards tend to be (p. 17).

The report suggests a “cultural chasm” between print and Web, as one of the former editors of ESPN The Magazine termed it (p. 41). On one side of the chasm are those inclined to apply the traditional journalistic standards of print to the Web, although an inked-in-the-word snobbery leads some to presume the need for accuracy on the Web to be less urgent; they don’t quite consider Internet copy the equal of print. On the other side of the divide are those who consider “speed and maximizing traffic as a means to attract advertisers is their number one priority. From that perspective, if the number of 'eyeballs' trumps the quality of copy presentation, and produces minor factual errors, so be it” (p. 41).

The question of whether users and advertisers will value high standards of content and transparency of sourcing is an important one to Book of Odds. We are betting they will. Had we filled out the Columbia questionnaire, we would have said we do fact checking and copy editing on all our content. We would have added that we have blended the Web’s main citation convention of permalinks with old-fashioned source citations using the simplified citation rules of JAMA. We would have pointed out that all of our odds show sources and glossary terms on their detail pages, so any user can check the accuracy of our numbers by replicating them. Our intention is to be a long-term resource, available decades from now. That is why we maintain a source database which contains all materials we use or create and does not rely on “permalinks,” which are often far from permanent.

It is our hope that everyone, including journalists, bloggers, professionals, and advertisers will find these standards a differentiator which gives value to our brand. Will they? We are betting they will as a corrective to the unsourced, unattributed, and un-fact-checked sites profilerating on the Web. We pay the price to be as accurate and transparent as we can be. And we imagine a Web 3.0 whose search algorithms reward transparency.

As for the wisdom of the crowd? We love it too, and in coming months will engage it more and more. But we will always bear in mind that a group of voices, no matter how harmonized, is not a random sample. Its wisdom may be interesting, thought provoking, or just plain fun, but it can’t be called statistically significant.