5.7 Crowdsourcing

What is crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is obtaining input or data for a task by enlisting the services of many people, typically via the Internet. This can include citizen science projects, funding through crowdfunding, tagging photos, or contributing to open datasets. It leverages large groups of people, often volunteers, to solve problems or gather information faster than a small team could alone.

Benefits of crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing can produce large, useful datasets and solve problems that would be difficult for individuals or small groups. Examples include Wikipedia (collaborative knowledge), reCAPTCHA (digitizing text while verifying humans), and citizen science projects like classifying galaxies. It harnesses collective effort at scale, often at low cost.

Risks and limitations

Crowdsourced data can suffer from inaccuracy or bias since contributors vary in expertise and motives. It raises concerns about the reliability of data, potential for malicious or false input, and privacy issues when personal data is collected. Verifying and cleaning crowdsourced data is often necessary before it can be trusted for decision-making.

Key terms

Crowdsourcing

Obtaining input or data for a task by enlisting the services of many people, typically via the Internet.

Citizen science

Scientific research conducted with contributions from members of the public, often through crowdsourcing.

Wikipedia as crowdsourcing

A collaboratively built encyclopedia edited by volunteers worldwide.

reCAPTCHA

A system that crowdsources human verification tasks to also help digitize text and train machine learning models.

Risk of crowdsourced data

Data can be inaccurate or biased since contributors vary in expertise, motives, and reliability.

Try an AP-style question

What is crowdsourcing?

1. Getting input or work from many people online
2. Encrypting data for a crowd
3. Storing data on one private server
4. Compressing data into packets