I guess a lifetime of my friends handing me books that were written by smarter people than either of us as well as the widely popularity of a site like wikipedia.
Maybe IQ is the wrong word when it comes to subject matter excellence. Maybe it's a combination of knowledge and IQ. But I certainly do not enjoy reading the Toronto Sun.
As for assessing the intelligence of an online community, it shouldn't be too hard. It's been proven that for native English speakers vocabulary directly correlates to IQ, even when controlling for linguistic IQ. So you could put together a managed LDA generative model that trains on various documents either classified as academic research all the way down to 5th grade writing and see what the topic drift is over time. Should correlate relatively well.
Maybe IQ is the wrong word when it comes to subject matter excellence. Maybe it's a combination of knowledge and IQ. But I certainly do not enjoy reading the Toronto Sun.
As for assessing the intelligence of an online community, it shouldn't be too hard. It's been proven that for native English speakers vocabulary directly correlates to IQ, even when controlling for linguistic IQ. So you could put together a managed LDA generative model that trains on various documents either classified as academic research all the way down to 5th grade writing and see what the topic drift is over time. Should correlate relatively well.