Crowdsourcing
Introduced| English |
|---|
| Crowdsourcing/ˈkraʊdsɔːsɪŋ/ |
| Citizen science/ˈsɪtɪzn ˈsaɪəns/ |
| diverse/daɪˈvɜːs/ |
| quality/ˈkwɒlɪti/ |
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:
The Internet enables it on a global scale.
The Internet lets crowdsourcing reach millions of contributors from anywhere.
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.
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.
Citizen science is a common form of crowdsourcing.
A key benefit of crowdsourcing is:
Many hands and viewpoints tackle a huge task.
A key challenge of crowdsourced data is:
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.
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.