I may not know prior art, but I know what I like
Crowds may not be all that wise (see the latest Wikipedia debacle, for instance), but they can be smart, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, an agency in need of help if ever there was one, is hoping to tap into that intelligence.
Context & Ripple Effects
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's move to open examination to outside contributors — reported the same day by the Washington Post's open call from the Patent Office — lands at an awkward moment for the crowdsourcing thesis. The corpus has spent two years cataloguing Wikipedia's credibility troubles: hoax entries and pervasive vandalism by August 2006, the vandalism of Wikipedia's own vandalism page, the congressional-staff editing investigation opened in January 2006 after the Meehan staff edits, and the site's January 2007 switch to nofollow outbound links against spam.
So this is not a story about whether the crowd can be wise in the abstract — the column itself cites 'the latest Wikipedia debacle' to say crowds may not be all that wise — but about whether a structured task (finding prior art) can capture what unstructured encyclopedic editing cannot. The pickup across the Washington Post, Silicon Valley Watcher ('Patent Office 2.0?') and the New York Times shows the experiment being read as a test case for participatory government, not just patent procedure.
First-order effects
- Examiners at the USPTO gain a volunteer channel for surfacing prior art they currently miss under workload pressure, while applicants see their claims exposed to scrutiny from technically literate outsiders before a patent issues.
- The USPTO, described in its own coverage as an agency in need of help, gets reputational cover: outsourcing part of the search function signals the problem is volume and expertise gaps, not examiner diligence alone.
Second-order effects
- Software and internet companies holding deep prior-art archives gain leverage they lack in litigation: contributing references costs little and can invalidate broad claims upstream, shifting some contest over patents from courtrooms to the application stage.
- Other overstretched federal review agencies now have a named precedent to copy or disavow — if the USPTO pilot works, 'agency 2.0' becomes a template; if spammers and vandals flood it the way they hit Wikipedia, every agency crowdsourcing proposal inherits that objection.
Third-order effects
- If focused-task crowdsourcing outperforms the encyclopedia model, gatekeeping institutions generally start treating expert publics as infrastructure rather than threat — a structural move from closed professional review toward audited open review across regulatory bodies.
- Conversely, if the Wikipedia failure mode repeats, the episode hardens into the standard argument that crowds need curation, pushing future designs toward credentialed or reputation-weighted participation rather than open contribution — either way, the design question shifts from 'whether to involve the public' to 'how to structure it.'
The trend: Government agencies are beginning to import web-era participation mechanisms into professional review functions, with patent examination as the highest-stakes early test of whether structured crowds can do what unstructured crowds demonstrably struggle with.