Talk:Crowdsourcing

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[edit] Defining the outsourcing/crowdsourcing boundaries

Isn't the recruitment of all the public's ideas targeted to specific individuals or companies considered the crowd part of crowdsourcing? Look at www.ideasxchange.com.

OK, I've edited Microengagement's post a couple of times because it is NOT crowdsourcing. Linking a client with a few hired experts is the opposite of crowdsourcing. If you do any reading on the topic, the theory of crowds is that a bunch of 'generalists' are always smarter than a few 'experts' ... any thoughts on what do to with this?? I agree with Liface that 2.0 buzzwords drive me crazy, but I hate it even more when oldschool companies slap newschool buzzwords on their business models. Shazz Aug 11/06

Where does the line stand between outsourcing and crowdsourcing - RentACoder.com could be considered both? It almost seems that generally crowdsourcing needs many small inputs that build up to a whole, while outsourcing is for larger units of work? Benjaminhill 22:17, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Hopefully the line stands so that all these ridiculous WEB 2.0 BUZZWORDS go away. Podcasting, crowdsourcing, who cares? It's just a giant nerd circlejerk. --Liface 02:25, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Outsourcing is a contractual arrangement between a central agent and one or a few contractors known ex ante. Crowdsourcing is a quasi- or implicit contractual arrangement between one or many agents and many contractors who are only known ex post. I hope that satisfies. Unlike podcasting, I think crowdsourcing is a legitimate concept: Wiki and linux both come to mind as examples. Podcasting used to be called "digital recordings", and have not changed. Ehusman 01:07, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Open Source Projects that are really distributed

MySQL certainly does not represent distributed OSS development, it's rather centralistic due to their dual-licencing model.

[edit] This is rather odd...

Somebody purchased a Google ad linking to this article. Try a crowdsourcing search to see. More discussion here: http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/09/wikipedia_adver.html - EurekaLott 20:48, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Many of the more commercial external links have been removed. Feel free to discuss them or add some back in if necessary. Many of them seemed to be of the "this is an example of crowdsourcing" type. I think it might be better to just use internal links for these, even if it's a redlink, and then describe why the company might be a good example of a crowdsourcing company. Certainly some of the companies are referenced in reliable sources [1]. --Interiot 04:41, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
I just removed all ext links except Jeff Howe's blog. These will need a careful eye kept on them. - David Gerard 10:36, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
I've traced the editor and company who placed the content on WP (and likely arranged for the adverts) and they have been (a) blocked, and (b) the article about themselves they had also added has been removed. WP is not a place for companies involved in a particular business to promote themselves nor a place for a list of such businesses. --AlisonW 11:39, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Cambrian House, I take it. I'm not sure speedy deletion was appropriate there, does the company pass Wikipedia:Notability (companies and corporations) standards? If so we should just clean it up instead. Bryan 16:02, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Large parts of it were pretty clearly COI/advert, so it would have had to have been mostly rewritten anyway. Considering that it launched 3 months ago, and has no mention in CNET/Wired/ZDNet/Google News (except for a small mention here), I'm not sure how it could meet WP:CORP. --Interiot 16:32, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Advertising

As noted above, it has come to the attention of Wikimedia that someone appears to have purchased links from Google (and possibly elsewhere) leading to this article. Neither the Wikimedia Foundation not the Chapters arranged for any of this advertising, nor were they aware in advance that such advertising was being arranged by a third party. It is likely that an individual or company who had previously managed to place links on this page arranged for this advertising as some method of their gaining credibility and additional advertising. Wikipedia policies do not encourage links to commercial websites and our usual practice is to delete them where found, as has been done with this article. --Alison Wheeler, Chair Wikimedia UK. 11:20, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Could Second Life be an example of crowdsourcing as well? After all, there is no way Second Life's creators, Linden Lab, would be able to create the whole content of this million-user virtual world on its own, even if they had a thousand 3D designers working for 10 years...

--Gwyneth Llewelyn 22:25, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Crud

While the concept as a whole sounds somewhat valid, it feels as though it was conceived solely as a buzzword for articles and books and new, hip management styles to be pushed to execs. A google search still has the adword pointing to the wikipedia page, even though it's the first hit, and it's first page only has a businessweek article, a technorati cluster link and a handful of blogs set up JUST to discuss crowdsourcing.

Deletion would seem like a half decent idea. --hif 11:36, 4 November 2006 (UTC+5)

In English, it basically means "pay a bunch of suckers little or nothing to do your work for you". It's not a new concept...but now it's on THE INTERNET! *groan* --Takeel 14:58, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Or getting individual users to build you an encyclopedia for little or no money, and gettign away with it by calling it a Wiki or something 65.94.190.146 03:02, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia isn't for profit, ya dig? --71.62.243.176 04:20, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV, Spam and Sources

I'm troubled by these warning indicators. I coined this term and have thus far declined to edit or comment on this page in any way. But this article has become so addled with these warnings that I felt compelled to step in ask for some assistance. Let me address each warning in order:

1) NPOV: The ideas in this section, such as collective customer commitment and mass customization, are founded in research conducted by MIT professors Frank Piller and Eric von Hippel, respectively. They are, imo, relatively small slices of the crowdsourcing pie, and I probably wouldn't have written this section, but the ideas are clearly related to Crowdsourcing. Further, this seems like a fairly neutral, flat description of the concepts, certainly not over-promotional. I'd suggest this warning should be removed.

2) Spam: This section is indeed a spam magnet, but generally some right-thinking editor comes along and nixes the offending addition. I removed "Steve Jackson Games" from the list of examples tonight. I've been tracking crowdsourcing assiduously for almost a year and I've never heard of the company. In addition, from what the entry said it doesn't sound like crowdsourcing to me (customer feedback is not crowdsourcing). However, the other 13 examples would be considered to follow a crowdsourcing model, a fact well-documented in popular literature (Cambrian House, for instance, has been written about extensively in the press as well as on many respected blogs. Again, the descriptions don't seem over-promotional.

3) Sources: I'm not in a position to contest this because I'm not sure what it means (and yes, I did go to the relevant explainer page). Are secondary sources like my Wired article insufficient? The one I did for Time Magazine? More to the point, other journalists have covered it from publications like the Boston Globe, the Canadian Globe & Mail, CNET, BNET, Business Week, Business 2.0, et. al. Right now Nexis shows 175 stories mentioning crowdsourcing. I'm happy to add the best, most thorough and balanced of these pieces to the "external references" section, but I'd like to make sure that's what's needed.

I'm concerned that some of this heightened scrutiny is rooted in a distrust and dislike for the emergence of the term--Everyone loves to hate a buzzword. No argument here. But love it or hate it, crowdsourcing seems to have crossed a tipping point in this regard. There are currently 2.6 million Google hits for the term; it's the subject of at least three doctoral dissertations that I know of; and Wired.com and NYU have just launched a major research [project][2] into crowdsourcing methodologies.

All this said, I do think a healthy skepticism is missing from the Crowdsourcing page. I'm no blind advocate of the trend. I think it will liberate people's potential creative and intellectual talents, and I think it will promote meritocracy over nepotism by creating a level playing field. I also think it will lead to exploitation in the hands of unethical companies. It will also lead to serious economic disruption, with people losing jobs and entire industries undergoing painful upheaval. All this is missing from the page, and I'd feel uncomfortable adding it myself. Hopefully one of crowdsourcing's critics (and there are more than a few) will write a thoughtful critique of the model.

I have taken the liberty to replace the definition with my own. Quite a bit of consensus has developed around this definition, and it's the one we're employing in Assignment Zero, the NYU/Wired research project I mentioned above. Other than this I'd rather not inflict my will on this page, leaving that up to the crowd that makes Wikipedia such a magical resource. JeffPHowe 10:23, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks again for taking the time to opine on this, and doubly so for keeping at arms length from the content. Your knowledge on this term will be very useful in building a well rounded article on the subject. Firstly, the indicators that you have termed warning indicators are often misunderstood to mean that, and its not hard to understand why: they are gross. That said, they are best understood if you think of them as editing/reviewing markers on an unpublished article. Basicly, this article isnt up to scratch yet, and contributors have decided to add the tags to ensure the reader doesnt think this article is representative of Wikipedia's best work.
Ok, onto each tag...in order of importance...
{{Unreferenced}}: This meanly means that the article doesnt provide sufficient reliable sources; yes, secondary sources are fine. If you can add references to five good quality articles amoungst the 175 on LexisNexis that mention crowdsourcing, that would be sufficient to remove this tag. When selecting the "best", give preference to ones where the article predominately about crowdsourcing, from reputable sources, and articles that can be accessed online without subscription (see google news archive. Also, some consideration should be given to demonstrating the term is in regular and continual use (currently the reader could come away from the Wikipedia article thinking the term was a flash in the pan during June/July 2006).
{{POV-section}}: This indicates the article isnt balanced; specifically the section "Advantages" was created without any indication that there was disadvantages. To not have a tag here would let our readers assume that outsourcing is a brilliant basis for a business plan, as there are no disadvantages. In your comments above you outline a number of macroeconomic disadvantages of crowdsourcing, which I think can be summed up as "TANSTAAFL". Unless the enthusiasts participating are gaining economic value from their investment of time, a company that is using crowdsourcing is a net-loss to the economy, and the market or courts usually dispenses with such companies at the first opportunity. I cant think of a good example of this (hopefully you can), but I expect we can find cases where the community has lashed out at the company with little provocation, simply because the community feels that they have as much ownership of the resource that has been created, and they see indicators of bad stewardship. This tag will be removed when the article covers the good, the bad and the ugly. John Vandenberg 02:35, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
{{cleanup-spam}}: As you point out, this section is being kept under control. The tag was added a few days ago [3] by User:Interiot because this section is attracting SPAM at a rapid rate. To address this, we need to work out why people are adding entries, and try to discourage it. The simplest fix is to remove any mention of companies that do not have an article, as that usually means they are Not Notable. At the moment, the article mentions NowPublic; if you think that company is notable, we can write a brief article for it. If not, we should remove it otherwise it attracts more entries of that ilk. Another way to keep this list trimmed is to enforce a decision that each entry must be accompanied with a secondary source to justify that it is an appropriate example. This approach would require that we find a source for each of the current examples. Another approach is to convert the list into prose that links the key examples of crowdsourcing. Lists in general attract unwanted additions, but prose attracts clever inappropriate additions that are more difficult to spot.
Hopefully one of crowdsourcing's critics ... will write a thoughtful critique of the model.
It isnt strictly necessary that the disadvantages be spelled out by a secondary source, as the the criticisms can be founded in economics and humanities, and thus attributed without the sources needing to mention "crowdsourcing" specifically. However, it would be a tautology for a contributor to Wikipedia to be sufficiently critical of crowdsourcing to do the leg work required to join those dots. :-) I've optimistically added a blank "Disadvantages" section to the article in the hope someone feels the need to demonstrate that they are not myopic. John Vandenberg 02:35, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

AS a first reader of this entry it seems rather naive in terms of placing the concept with general theories of innovation and the role of users in innovation processes. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.215.101.110 (talk • contribs) 16:49, 23 March 2007.

[edit] Open Source vs. Crowdsource

I've declined to edit the "overview" section although I feel it is less an overview than a view on the distinction between crowdsourcing and open source projects, a fairly contained issue. Neither is it factually accurate: it is not true that "In this new model of collaboration the results of the global efforts returns only in the organization which leads the project." Crowdsourcing merely implies a form of labor procurement; it does not imply who benefits from the labor. Certainly the results of the crowd's efforts often benefit those members who contributed the labor, in both financial rewards and personal satisfaction. The global commons often benefits as well. The US Patent Office recently initiated a form of crowdsourcing, in which an open call for experts to review pending patents is being employed. The benefits from such a program would be widespread. The unfortunate association between crowdsourcing and corporate greed is a misapprehension. Like outsourcing, crowdsourcing is merely an approach to economic production, and can serve self-interest and the interest of the commons, sometimes at the same time. However, this is admittedly my view (even if it is backed up by considerable research) and as such I'll keep my argument to the talk page. JeffPHowe 11:15, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

My immediate reaction to reading this section was that open source is the most established form of crowd sourcing, but with the legal protection built into some licenses to prevent abuse (the truly free/open licenses). Open content is in the same boat as far as I can see. Even though open source does not initially start as a business model, it oft is a key factor in business models by other parties. e.g. IBM is now betting a decent part of their business on laissez-faire style development which they employ people to participate in, as they consider it a valid strategy to compete with Microsoft and Sun in the market place.(this is spelled out in the IBM court filings below) As a result, I can see why Wikipedians have focused on how crowdsourcing relates to open source.
The last sentence is rather odd; the article is talking about procurement, in which case there should be no expectation that anyone else other the company that pays will benefit. Any other benefits are bonuses. The problem is ensuring the 'employee' is adequately remunerated. I've been playing around with MTurk for the last two weeks as it sparked my interest in this subject. I'm actually wanting to create some HITs, so I thought I would attempt a few myself to see how it all works. So far, I've been paid $0.21c for about three hours effort. While I am feeling pretty happy about those microcents, I've come away thinking that its quite disgusting to see crowdsourcers are not willing to pay respectable amounts for difficult tasks. I've got a nasty streak of unionism in me, so the per HIT loose arrangements that are binding the employer and employee are already a bit of an issue; coupled with the extremely low rates of pay, it looks more like pure exploitation. As far as I can see, MTurk HITs can only be created by a US employer; I'm guessing this is because there are no minimum wages or other applicable regulation in the US. It would certainly create a stir here in Australia; we have started making provisions for these types of contractual employments (WorkChoices), but we have retained minimum wages as well (I haven't had to grapple with these new laws yet so I'm not sure how these are both true). Our unions like to stir up a lot of hot air about any scenario when a employee is taken advantage of. John Vandenberg 09:50, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Open source as Crowdsourcing

As a wade in the open waters a bit, I've thought of a few cases that are worth mulling over.

Minor issues
  • The Mozilla Foundation preventing third parties from distributing products using trademarks that are owned by the foundation. This prevents Debian from altering the source of Firefox in minor ways and calling the result "Firefox". They needed to call it Iceweasel.
  • JasperReports "closed" an open source project. This was a very amicable and legal process, as there were few contributors at the time. However the result is this piece of software is very close to crowdsourcing -- JasperSoft is uniquely able to commercially benefit from improvements provided by others.
  • MySQL and Qt have similar arrangements, where one company is able to make money licensing the code-base to others under a different license.[4] Its worth noting here that this was important enough that Trolltech has provided a special license that allows unrestricted use of Qt with KDE in order to pacify the peanut gallery.
Not real sure about these two
  • Apple Safari does it page layout using a renderer called WebCore which is a fork of KHTML. There has often been "problems" cited that Apple is not "giving back" to the KHTML codebase. The most recent example was that was when Safari was the first browser to pass the Acid2 test, everyone expected that the fixes required to achieve this would be provided to KHTML.[5] IIRC Apple did in fact make the code changes available even before the controversy began, but in a supposedly unpalatable manner. It was amicably sorted out, and I'm guessing that Apple is a bit more cautious about this as a result.
  • Apple OS X is built on an open source OS called Darwin and there was doubts about whether it would be possible to rebuild OS X from source.[6] (this is a similar problem to Tivoization below, but in this case the majority of the code was written by Apple so its other peoples work that is being misappropriated as it is people expectations that are being dashed) I've not followed this one so Im not sure what the outcome was.
Major problems
  • Tivoization is a using a difficult to plug loophole in GPLv2 to restrict users from having the well defined benefits of the GPLv2. A lot of linux kernel hackers dont really mind, but a decent percent of free software adherents consider this illegal as it is against the spirit of the GPLv2. GPLv3 is attempting to resolve this, but the linux kernel cant adopt GPLv3 easily, as agreement from all kernel contributors would be required.
  • The SCO Group. They tried to impose a fee on Linux users worldwide because they claim to own "Unix", yet at the same time they distributed multiple operating systems that used open source. Many open source projects stopped maintaining their projects for Open Server and Caldera, and some even used legalese to prevent their package from being included in these operating systems (e.g. nmap). If you are interested in this, I recommend reading IBM's latest filings. Specifically 979 - 981 which spell out the way that this company has broken the GPL and has been grasping at straws for the duration of the proceedings. The IBM lawyers toss in some wit to aid you through the reading.
    • This is a good example of the "crowd" mobilising against the sourcer :-) groklaw is evidence of the lengths that the open source community will go to in order to bury this company.

[edit] Disadvantages

I'm going to throw down a few sentences to get people started. It would be a lie to pretend I don't have some vested interest in the promulgation of this term, so it puts me contributions in a specious light. I hope that such full disclosure of bias, and a warm embrace of balance will help offset that. I encourage any and all to add to my bit, or elide it in favor of their own. I have, for the record, removed the comment "get your ideas ripped off by big business!" as it smacks more of vandalism than a substantive addition.

[edit] Spam Disclaimer

Given that the Spam disclaimer only refers to external links, it seems to be an inappropriate header since the links are all internal. If the list of crowdsourced companies is growing too long, perhaps all but the 3 most prominent should be eliminated? --Antelan talk 03:29, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

That section was sporting all sorts of links not so long ago. We have just move to a "must have a Wiki article before being considered worthwhile" type approach to keeping the list under control. As you point out, that then makes the tag a bit pointless. John Vandenberg 13:54, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cafepress

In the interest of further thinning out the long list of crowdsourced businesses, I've taken a look at Cafepress, and its inclusion seems somewhat off-topic for this article. Cafepress is analogous to a book publisher, and does not seem to match the definition of a crowdsourced business as stated in the opening of the article. I plan to remove the link one week from now unless there is disagreement. Antelan talk 17:35, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

I think it was included because it has a similar "feel" to what MTurk is doing. MTurk a marketplace for crowdsourcing, while Cafepress and Zazzle are market places for other innovation. CafePress was added here in November, and Zazzle was added in October. John Vandenberg 22:50, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply. The edit history is useful in understanding why someone might have added a link to Cafepress. However, given that you said that "Cafepress and Zazzle are marketplaces for other innovation," and given my previous analogy between Cafepress and a book publisher, I still don't feel that Cafepress's presence in this article is justified. Antelan talk 22:58, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree that it is an odd entry. Do you want to ask the contributors of those two diffs whether they would like to comment ? John Vandenberg 02:23, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
Good call. One was added by an anonymous contributor, but I managed to find the other contributor and leave a message on his/her talk page two days ago. No response yet, but I'm in no rush. Antelan talk 17:19, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pending deletion of "Marketplaces" and "types of crowdsourced work"

Given that encyclopedia articles are not generally lists of services, I plan on deleting the "marketplaces" and "types of crowdsourced work" sections entirely in the next few days. If there is opposition, please state here. My intention is to clean up this article and make it legitimate in its own right, instead of allowing it to continue as little more than a disambiguation page for crowdsourced projects. Antelan talk 05:49, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

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