Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is an online participatory culture activity that brings together large, diverse sets of people and directs their energies and talents toward varied tasks designed to achieve specific goals. The concept draws on the principle that the diversity of knowledge and skills offered by a crowd exceeds the knowledge and skills offered by an elite, select few. For big data, it offers access to abilities for tasks too complex for computational analysis. Corporations, government groups, and nonprofit organizations all use crowdsourcing for multiple projects, and the crowds consist of volunteers who choose to engage tasks toward goals determined by the organizations. Though these goals may benefit the organizations more so than the crowds helping them, ideally the benefit is shared between the two. Crowdsourcing breaks down into basic procedures, the tasks and their applications, the crowds and their makeup, and the challenges and ethical questions.

Crowdsourcing follows a general...