Crowdsourcing

The term crowdsourcing is widely attributed to a 2006 article in Wired magazine, written by Jeff Howe. It is defined, in essence, as the delegation to the nonexpert Internet user of tasks traditionally exclusive to professionals. A by-product of the information age and of the “Web 2.0”—a term for the era of the Internet in which users are actively engaged in creating and evaluating content—crowdsourcing has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity over the past decade. The potential benefit to researchers and practitioners is primarily in menial, time-consuming tasks that are vital to an organization’s goals and thus are often assigned expert attention, yet do not necessarily require a great deal of expertise in order to carry out. After all, if one can assign such ...