

The Myth of Crowdsourcing - yarapavan
http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/28/crowdsourcing-enterprise-innovation-technology-cio-network-jargonspy.html

======
RyanMcGreal
Bit of a straw man. "Crowdsourcing" per se is the idea of capturing and
combining the individual contributions of many different people to produce an
aggregate result that is far greater than any individual contribution. More
specifically, it entails the idea that the barrier to contribution is very
low, i.e. if someone only wants to make a very modest contribution - say,
changing a misspelled possessive "it's" to "its" in a Wikipedi article - their
small contribution can still be captured.

In contrast, a more corporate collaboration model requires that every employee
puts in a roughly equivalent level of contribution, which raises the barrier
to entry too high for people who only want to make one small change.

Wikipedia would be much smaller without the dedication of page curators; but
it would also be much smaller (and more error-ridden) without the myriad small
contributions of low-scale, occasional editors.

~~~
skolor
I know its a little off topic, but every time I hear it mentioned I want to
say something about it:

Rather than complain about the typos or inaccuracies on Wikipedia, fix them.
I've had an account registered for a couple of years, and might put in a
handful of small edits every few months. It adds up, and just complain about
it like people tend to do doesn't help anything.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
One of the nice things about the Wikipedia model is that you can materially
improve an article on a given topic without actually knowing anything about
that topic. I'm no wikipedian high roller, but I've taken a moment or two to
clean up the spelling and grammar on several articles over the years.

------
gruseom
Sloppy thinking. A given Wikipedia _article_ may be the work of an individual,
but _Wikipedia_ is the work of many. Really, his only point is that he doesn't
like the word "crowdsourcing" because he doesn't like crowds. If it were
called "herosourcing" instead, he'd have written the same article about how
great Wikipedia etc. are.

------
wglb
This article gets several things wrong. First, it repeats the error that the
netflix prize was a crowdsourced accomplishment. In the sense of "The Wisdom
of Crowds" it was not. Crowdsourcing in that sense is the result of combining
opinions or outputs from individuals _acting independently_. The combined
teams in the finals of the netflix competition were not operating
independently.

Additionally, Aaron Swartz in
<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia> does actual research to
show who writes wikipedia, and it counters what Jimmy Wales says about who
writes wikipedia.

But the author has a much better haircut than I and is unmistakably more
handsome.

------
ivankirigin
I think how Facebook translated the site is one of the biggest examples of
proper crowdsourcing. It does take some expertise - namely knowledge of two
languages. But the set of people with that kind of knowledge is definitely big
enough to call it a crowd. I'll have to ask internally at Facebook how many
people were involved. My guess would be more than 1000.

------
yarapavan
From the article: "So what's my problem? Why does it bug me that people think
crowdsourcing is something it is not? Why do I care that people think a crowd
is capable of individual virtuosity? What bugs me is that misplaced faith in
the crowd is a blow to the image of the heroic inventor. We need to nurture
and fund inventors and give them time to explore, play and fail. A false idea
of the crowd reduces the motivation for this investment, with the supposition
that companies can tap the minds of inventors on the cheap."

