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Bit of a straw man. "Crowdsourcing" per se is the idea of capturing and combining the individual contributions of many different people to produce an aggregate

Bit of a straw man. "Crowdsourcing" per se is the idea of capturing and combining the individual contributions of many different people to produce an aggregate result that is far greater than any individual contribution. More specifically, it entails the idea that the barrier to contribution is very low, i.e. if someone only wants to make a very modest contribution - say, changing a misspelled possessive "it's" to "its" in a Wikipedi article - their small contribution can still be captured. In contrast, a more corporate collaboration model requires that every employee puts in a roughly equivalent level of contribution, which raises the barrier to entry too high for people who only want to make one small change. Wikipedia would be much smaller without the dedication of page curators; but it would also be much smaller (and more error-ridden) without the myriad small contributions of low-scale, occasional editors.

skolor 17y ago
I know its a little off topic, but every time I hear it mentioned I want to say something about it: Rather than complain about the typos or inaccuracies on Wikipedia, fix them. I've had an account registered for a couple of years, and might put in a handful of small edits every few months. It adds up, and just complain about it like people tend to do doesn't help anything.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  One of the nice things about the Wikipedia model is that you can materially improve an article on a given topic without actually knowing anything about that topic. I'm no wikipedian high roller, but I've taken a moment or two to clean up the spelling and grammar on several articles over the years.
timwiseman 17y ago
You have a good point. But the main articles point is that much of what is called crowdsourcing isn't. It is the work of one individual out of a crowd to which a few others may or may not make smaller contributions. This is not to say that there are not true crowdsourced projects (despite what the article says, I think wikipedia is a shining example) but that many things identified as crowdsourced are not, or at least not in the way that the nontechnical public thinks of it.

skolor 17y ago

I know its a little off topic, but every time I hear it mentioned I want to say something about it: Rather than complain about the typos or inaccuracies on Wikipedia, fix them. I've had an account registered for a couple of years, and might put in a handful of small edits every few months. It adds up, and just complain about it like people tend to do doesn't help anything.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago
One of the nice things about the Wikipedia model is that you can materially improve an article on a given topic without actually knowing anything about that topic. I'm no wikipedian high roller, but I've taken a moment or two to clean up the spelling and grammar on several articles over the years.

timwiseman 17y ago

You have a good point. But the main articles point is that much of what is called crowdsourcing isn't. It is the work of one individual out of a crowd to which a few others may or may not make smaller contributions. This is not to say that there are not true crowdsourced projects (despite what the article says, I think wikipedia is a shining example) but that many things identified as crowdsourced are not, or at least not in the way that the nontechnical public thinks of it.