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Crowdsourcing/Print version
Reference material by Wikibooks contributors. This retains its source identity and is not 411 news reporting.
Crowdsourcing
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Crowdsourcing: the Wiki Way of Working explains an approach to organising work that is in some ways the opposite of traditional planning and management. It draws out some lessons from the most visibly successful crowdsourcing projects that support education and research, including Wikipedia. It shows how these community-based projects, despite their unorthodox methods, share educational and scholarly objectives with more traditional institutions and projects. It suggests ways in which those institutions and projects can benefit from working with Wikipedia and the wider Wikimedia community.
It was originally published in February 2014 as an infoKit on the Jisc infoNet site and is reproduced here under its CC-BY-SA licence. It can be read as a series of self-contained points or case-studies, or as a journey from theory to practice. Development of the infoKit was funded by Jisc and Wikimedia UK.
This is not meant to be a comprehensive manual of crowdsourcing. The topic is also addressed in parts of the Wikibooks Citizen Science and Lentis: The Social Interface of Technology.
Contents
Two approaches to complex tasks
The Wikipedia way
Division of labour
Wikipedia, the triumph of crowdsourcing
Progress without a plan
The drive for quality
Summing up
Free content and open processes
Making soup with stone
Intellectual property
Network effects (the power of one)
Summing up
Community design
Norms and culture
A shared goal
The right kind of goal
Summing up
Gamification
Managing motivations
Recognition and badging in Wikipedia
Summing up
Crowdsourcing in practice
Division of labour for a scholarly database
Defining progress: geographical data
Motivation: documenting a town
Crowdsourcing the restoration and reuse of images
Keeping everybody happy
Image restoration
Contextualisation
Improving image metadata
Summing up
Further reading
Two approaches to complex tasks
The Wikipedia way
Division of labour
Wikipedia, the triumph of crowdsourcing
Progress without a plan
The drive for quality
Summing up
Free content and open processes
Making soup with stone
Intellectual property
Network effects (the Power of One)
Summing up
Community design
Norms and culture
A shared goal
The right kind of goal
Summing up
Gamification
Managing motivations
Recognition and badging in Wikipedia
Summing up
Crowdsourcing in practice
Division of labour for a scholarly database
Defining progress: geographical data
Motivation: documenting a town
Crowdsourcing the restoration and reuse of images
Keeping everybody happy
Image restoration
Contextualisation
Improving image metadata
Summing up
Further reading
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