Crowdsourcing: A Good Bad Idea?

The race for information on the internet is becoming more and more hectic as time progresses. This has led to crowdsourcing becoming one of the most used methods of data collection on the internet. The main reason for this is that it allows a lot of data to be collected very quickly. The trouble with this is that the data isn't always reliable.

A great example of this is Wikipedia. Wikipedia, if you somehow didn't know already, is an encyclopedia that uses crowdsourcing to get information for its articles. Anyone can write a Wikipedia article and anyone can edit it. This has allowed Wikipedia to quickly become one of the largest sources of information in the world as it has such a large number of people contributing towards it. However this has also compromised the reliability of Wikipedia's information. Due to the fact that anyone can provide or change the contents of Wikipedia's articles it has made it easy for people to vandalize the content, in some cases deleting it entirely. In other cases it has caused arguments between users which has lead to them editing articles back and fourth to be how they wanted it, leading to inconsistencies in the article and fluctuations from day to day.

So the main advantage of crowdsourcing is that it allows anyone to contribute. Unfortunately the main disadvantage of crowdsourcing is also that it allows anyone to contribute. How is this remedied? How has Wikipedia become so successful? The answer is a combination of moderation and data backups that results in the crowdsourced system being incredibly fault-tolerant. By using moderators to regulate what users can and cannot do, and by allowing the moderators to reverse changes made by users, the number of people that have to be trusted in order for the system to work is reduced greatly. The number of people that have to be trusted in order for the system to work is then reduced further by implementing a hierarchy of higher level moderators all the way up to an administrator.

Even with measures in place to prevent the chaos that is the internet from ruining a crowdsourced project some things still manage to slip through the metaphorical net of reports generated by users, and moderators. Although for the most part the system works and is generally far more efficient than any other system out there; some studies even show that Wikipedia is on-par in terms of accuracy with other encyclopedias like the Encyclopedia Britannica. That being said crowdsourcing still requires a lot of resources, like moderators and powerful servers to receive input from so many users at once.

Personally I think that crowdsourcing is the way forward. It allows large amounts of data to be collected quickly and at a relatively low cost compared to other methods of data collection. Admittedly some of that data may be rubbish provided by people who just want to watch the world burn, but so long as a responsible person filters the data at the end of the day, it's not half bad.

Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
http://www.ibtimes.com/wikipedia-study-says-its-accurate-280135
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page