Wisdom of the crowd is the principle that aggregating many independent judgments can produce a more accurate result than relying on a single judgment. In machine learning, ensemble methods use a similar idea by combining predictions from multiple models to improve robustness and accuracy.
The idea that averaging the opinions or estimates of a large group of people ("the crowd") often produces surprisingly good results. For example, consider a game in which people guess the number of jelly beans packed into a large jar. Although most individual guesses will be inaccurate, the average of all the guesses has been empirically shown to be surprisingly close to the actual number of jelly beans in the jar. Ensembles are a software analog of wisdom of the crowd. Even if individual models make wildly inaccurate predictions, averaging the predictions of many models often generates surprisingly good predictions. For example, although an individual decision tree might make poor predictions, a decision forest often makes very good predictions.