Planned Crowdsourcing Examples
Contents
16.2. Planned Crowdsourcing Examples#
Let’s now consider some examples of planned crowdsourcing, meaning a system or task was intentionally created and given to a crowd to work on.
16.2.1. Crowdsourcing Platforms#
Some online platforms are specifically created for crowdsourcing. For example:
Wikipedia: Is an online encyclopedia whose content is crowdsourced. Anyone can contribute, just go to an unlocked Wikipedia page and press the edit button. Institutions don’t get special permissions (e.g., it was a scandal when US congressional staff edited Wikipedia pages), and the expectation that editors do not have outside institutional support is intended to encourage more people to contribute.
Quora: An crowdsourced question and answer site.
Stack Overflow: A crowdsourced question-and-answer site specifically for programming questions.
Amazon Mechanical Turk: A site where you can pay for crowdsourcing small tasks (e.g., pay a small amount for each task, and then let a crowd of people choose to do the tasks and get paid).
Upwork: A site that lets people find and contract work with freelancers (generally larger and more specialized tasks than Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Project Sidewalk: Crowdsourcing sidewalk information for mobility needs (e.g., wheelchair users).
16.2.2. Example Crowdsourcing Tasks#
You probably already have some ideas of how crowds can work together on things like editing articles on a site like Wikipedia or answer questions on a site like Quora, but let’s look at some other examples of how crowds can work together.
Fold-It is a game that lets players attempt to fold proteins. At the time, researchers were having trouble getting computers to do this task for complex proteins, so they made a game for humans to try it. Researchers analyzed the best players’ results for their research and were able to publish scientific discoveries based on the contributions of players.
A research study demonstrated the power of crowd work by having Mechanical Turk workers build off of the work done by previous workers. To demonstrate, they wrote a note with intentionally bad and almost undecipherable handwriting:
Turkers (the people who do Mechanical Turk tasks) were then given the handwritten note and after the first few attempts at deciphering it, Turkers were either a previous attempt at deciphering the note, or asked to vote on which interpretations were improvements. They were instructed to leave parentheses around sections they weren’t sure about. Here is a selection of subsequent attempts at interpreting the note (from the paper):
version 1:
You (?) (?) (?) (work). (?) (?) (?) work (not) (time). I (?) (?) a few grammatical mistakes. Overall your writing style is a bit too (phoney). You do (?) have good (points), but they got lost amidst the (writing). (signature)
version 4:
You (misspelled) (several) (words). (?) (?) (?) work next (time). I also notice a few grammatical mistakes. …
version 5:
You (misspelled) (several) (words). (Plan?) (spellcheck) (your) work next time. I also notice a few grammatical mistakes. Overall your writing style is a bit too phoney. You do make some good (points), but they got lost amidst the (writing). (signature)
version 6:
You (misspelled) (several) (words). Please spellcheck your work next time. I also notice a few grammatical mistakes. Overall your writing style is a bit too phoney . You do make some good (points), but they got lost amidst the (writing). (signature)