SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
From Wikipedia to 99designs, and Google to LEGO, crowdsourcing has changed the way the world does business. By partnering with the masses through innovative campaigns, companies can benefit from a vast amount of expertise, enthusiasm and goodwill, rather than from paid labour. But what's in it for the crowd?
Why do ordinary people sign on to help design or produce a product without much compensation? Why do they volunteer their time and skills to a company that profits? And how can a firm better address the crowd's needs in order to to maximize value for all involved in the co-creation project?
Their findings are the first to show that there are four different types of members volunteering in these communities:
1. Communals build skills and community bonds;
2. Utilizers join the communities to sharpen their skills without much intention to form social bonds;
3. Aspirers lack both skills and bonds, but aim to gain more of both;
4. Tourists are minimally invested in both community and skills and infrequently participate.
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-big-businesscrowdsourcing-win-win-situation.html
[Abstract]: Managing Communities of Co-creation around Consumer Engagement Styles
Do you agree and would you be part of such crowd-sourcing initiatives ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @04:47AM (5 children)
I wouldn't put wikipedia up as a beacon of success with all the internet drama it's involved in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @06:38AM (4 children)
You must be kidding. Sure, Wikipedia has its issues, but I'd argue it's the single most well-known and successful example of crowdsourcing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @07:36AM (2 children)
I agree. Their digital panhandling campaign has been extremely successful at suckering individuals into donating, even as they were sitting on assets worth more than $77 Million in 2015. [washingtonpost.com]
Unfortunately I could not find any more recent figures, but would not be surprised if it was still in the high 8-figure range.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @07:40AM (1 child)
The costs to host Wikipedia are not that much and most of the contributors have not been paid. You are complaining about a separate entity called the Wikimedia Foundation that can slap banner ads onto Wikipedia for unnecessary fundraising.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @09:14AM
I agree. Wikipedia is 100% independent of the Wikimedia Foundation. Those ads only benefit WMF, not Wikipedia. Wikipedia makes all the money it needs from door-to-door encyclopedia sales. The WMF budget has gotten totally out of control.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday April 13 2017, @01:48PM
Sure, Wikipedia has its issues, but I'd argue it's the single most well-known and successful example of crowdsourcing.
I'd agree with the assertion that it's the "most well-known and successful example of crowdsourcing," at least in terms of content created so far.
But I'd also agree with the OP that it's a textbook example of social and project dysfunction created within a crowd-sourced project. Do you realize how many of the governing "policies" and practices of Wikipedia date back to the first year of the project, when there were a few hundred active people (including a lot of good folks and a lot of lunatics) just throwing out random ideas for how to make this thing work? Often there were serious debates, but ultimately a lot of the original debates weren't settled in favor of better long-term policies or community consensus, but by attrition: people who disagreed either just gave up and left the project or were at least brow-beaten enough to stop arguing.
But, having created this bureaucratic monstrosity, there was a significant growth spurt for nearly a decade. But the bad stuff eventually started to rot the project internally.
New active contributor numbers have been declining for years. The active maintaining base has been going down. New contributors are often met with hostility, with edits summarily reverted (this is a common metric used by Wikipedia insiders to pad their contribution metrics and try to work their way up the hierarchy: they know new users are easy targets and unlikely to bother arguing, so it's an easy add to your editing stats). If they get past the initial gatekeepers, they are often met by an army of Wikilawyers who quote obscure acronyms for policies rather than having debates on actual issues. Meanwhile, types and amount of vandalism, hoaxes, random manipulation (e.g., by corporations or individuals seeking to raise their status, both within Wikipedia and in the "real world") have been increasing. There are all sorts of ways they could be starting to "lock down" good content at least to prevent the easiest forms of vandalism, but the bureaucracy is mired in a bunch of policies that were arbitrarily determined by a tiny number of people 15 years ago who are mostly long gone. And yet the bureaucracy -- created by the precedents set early -- continues (and is arguably worse than ever).
So, it's possible for Wikipedia to both be the greatest success story (so far) and one of the worst examples of underlying dysfunction (which, if not addressed, will likely lead to serious degradation of the content in the long term).
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday April 13 2017, @05:42AM (3 children)
What if you already have skills?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @06:28AM
You'll be replaced by an AI or robot, of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @11:58AM (1 child)
If you have knowledge in some specific domain, or were part of some event/endeavor, you could always fix that little error in Wikipedia. It doesn't take long. Most topics are not subject to controversy... https://xkcd.com/386/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @03:26PM
I assume that the XKCD link means you're joking.
This is good, because I can tell you from personal experience that contributing actual, personally verified knowledge based on domain expertise, is not welcomed by wikipedia.
Waste of time trying to help that lot.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday April 13 2017, @11:49AM
I think crowdsourcing is usually driven by marketing and outreach, not by people who want to do work.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday April 13 2017, @01:11PM
Their findings are the first to show that there are four different types of members volunteering in these communities:
1. Communals build skills and community bonds;
2. Utilizers join the communities to sharpen their skills without much intention to form social bonds;
3. Aspirers lack both skills and bonds, but aim to gain more of both;
4. Tourists are minimally invested in both community and skills and infrequently participate.
I can think of several more (some of these will obviously overlap):
5. Grammar nazis and style freaks participate because they have an obsessive desire to fix things and make projects conform to whatever style guide. They sleep better at night knowing they have fixed the commas of the world.
6. Policy freaks (a.k.a. Wikilawyers) have an unnatural desire to create and debate governing policies; they often spend a lot more time debating technical policies than actually creating or editing content. Often they are most satisfied by winning arguments against other members, rather than contributing positively.
7. Police are members who gain satisfaction from fixing member-caused "problems" in the project, often caused by negative contributors (see below).
8. Kings-of-the-hill have an ultimate goal of establishing their little "fiefdom" somewhere in the project, which they would love to govern as a dictatorship; they are generally convinced that their solution to the project within their "fiefdom" is the best for all time.
9. Attention whores are more interested in making their contributions to the project known, rather than actually contributing significantly. They often find ways of gaming metrics for contribution to enhance their profiles.
10. Admins/moderators generally combine a king-of-the-hill complex with an attention whore, as well as some other positive aspects of the other above categories. Depending on the project and the way one can gain admin/moderator privileges, they can vary from exceedingly helpful to the project to forces that actively propagate more dysfunction.
And then you have the other types of volunteers with different goals for their "contributions":
11. Hackers (black hat) gain satisfaction from trying to destroy or disrupt the project, generally by disrupting or finding flaws in the underlying tech.
12. Vandals are also happy to destroy or disrupt things, but act on a more "surface" level, such as vandalizing the text of Wikipedia articles or inserting random crap into the codebase of a project.
13. Wise guys aren't really intent on destruction, but make bad contributions that effectively vandalize the project too, just because it's mildly amusing or they don't consider the consequences (e.g., people who create fake Wikipedia articles).
14. Trolls like to sow social discord among project members, interjecting comments they often don't actually believe in to get the more obsessive categories above (policy freaks, grammar nazis, police) yelling at each other rather than doing something more productive.
Etc., etc. I'm sure other people can come up with more categories.
It seems to me that most of the categories I list here are of people whose primary satisfaction or goal in the project doesn't come from "building skills" OR "community bonds" -- yet they often make up a large proportion of crowdsourced projects. And the more of these obsessive types and wackos and disrupters tend to be around, the harder it is to maintain an active community of more "normal" folks who just contribute in the ways TFA discusses.