Defining and Understanding Crowdsourcing
I read two articles this week on crowdsourcing: Conducting behavioural research on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (Mason and Suri, 2012) and Wilson's Crowdsourcing and self-instruction: Turning the production of teaching materials into a learning objective (2018). I realized that this is a concept I needed more information on to fully understand crowdsourcing and its uses. Throughout this blog post, I highlight different definitions of crowdsourcing as it is used in different contexts and for different purposes. In its simplest terms, I understand crowdsourcing as a practice of gathering information into a task or project from a large group of people. Mason and Suri defined crowdsourcing as "a job outsourced to an undefined group of people in the form of an open call" and discussed using crowdsourcing to conduct behavioural research by tapping into Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a marketplace for completion of virtual tasks that require...