

CrowdFlower Launches Open Data Project - lejohnq
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/crowdflower-data-for-everyone/

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alialkhatib
This is interesting, but a few concerns are nagging me:

1) There's been some research about the demographics of crowdworkers [1] that
questions whether it's a representative sample of any particular population,
and I wouldn't immediately concede that conclusions drawn from these survey
results are externally valid.

2) There's at least a little controversy around how well (or rather, poorly)
crowdworkers are paid and treated, with workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk
going as far as crowdsourcing a set of guidelines for academic requesters to
right some pretty egregious wrongs that have happened in the past few years
(disclosure: I was involved in the research [2] that facilitated those
guidelines).

I wouldn't necessarily forsake this data or anything learned from it, but
these concerns make me wary to use it myself very readily.

Does anyone else have concerns? Am I just being hyper-vigilant because this is
a personal research interest? I'm open to accusations that I'm biased, at
least in this case :P

[1]: Ross, Joel, et al. "Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in
mechanical turk." CHI'10 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing
systems. ACM, 2010.

[2]: publication/citation forthcoming; for now, a link is easier ->
[https://ali-alkhatib.com/media/papers/pn2032-paper.pdf](https://ali-
alkhatib.com/media/papers/pn2032-paper.pdf)

