Crowdsourcing
Introduced| English | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Crowdsourcing/ˈkraʊdsɔːsɪŋ/ | Obtaining contributions, ideas or work from a large group of people, commonly through an online system. |
| Citizen science/ˈsɪtɪzn ˈsaɪəns/ | Volunteers help classify galaxies or count wildlife. |
| diverse/daɪˈvɜːs/ | diverse |
| quality/ˈkwɒlɪti/ | The extent to which a product, service or outcome meets stated requirements or users' needs. |
Input from a crowd
- Crowdsourcing 众包 gathers input, ideas, content, or money from a large group of people, usually online.
- The Internet enables it on a global scale — millions can contribute from anywhere.
- A task too big for a few people is shared across many hands.
- No small team could match the reach of a connected crowd.
Crowdsourcing gathers input, content, or money from:
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The Internet enables it on a global scale.
The Internet lets crowdsourcing reach millions of contributors from anywhere.
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Global reach is what makes crowdsourcing so powerful.
Common examples
- Citizen science 公民科学: volunteers help classify galaxies or count wildlife.
- Product reviews and ratings written by ordinary users.
- Collaborative funding, where many people each give a small amount to back a project.
- In each case, scale comes from many small contributions.
A Wikipedia edit-a-thon: crowdsourcing pools many people's work into a shared resource
Benefit or challenge of crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing brings diverse, large-scale contributions, but also quality-control challenges since not every contributor is careful or honest.
Volunteers helping classify galaxies or count wildlife is an example of ______ science.
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Citizen science is a common form of crowdsourcing.
A key benefit of crowdsourcing is:
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Many hands and viewpoints tackle a huge task.
A key challenge of crowdsourced data is:
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Reliability must be managed, e.g. by majority answers.
Benefits and challenges
- The benefits are diverse 多样的 contributions and shared effort — a huge task spread across many viewpoints.
- But crowdsourced data brings challenges too.
- Reliability and quality 质量 control are hard, since not every contributor is careful or honest.
- So a good project plans for mistakes from the start.
Showing each item to several people and keeping the majority answer helps protect quality.
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It filters out careless or dishonest single answers.
Protecting quality
- A common defence is to show each item to several people and keep the majority answer.
- That filters out careless or dishonest single contributions.
Labelling galaxies. A project asks the public to label images as spiral or oval. No small research team could sort millions of images, but 100,000 online volunteers finish in weeks. The catch: some mislabel images — so the project shows each image to several people and keeps the majority answer to protect quality.
Crowdsourcing gathers input, content, or money from a large online crowd, which the Internet enables globally (e.g. citizen science). Its strength is diverse, shared effort; its challenge is quality control, since not every contributor is careful. Showing each item to several people and keeping the majority answer protects quality.