Crowdsourced

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining input, ideas, or content from a large and diverse group of people, typically via the Internet, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. It relies on decentralization, open calls, and scalable participation to complete tasks, solve problems, or generate knowledge more quickly or cheaply than conventional methods. The term, coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in Wired, blends crowd and outsourcing.

Common forms include idea generation, microtasking, data labeling, and open-content creation. Some crowdsourcing relies on volunteers, as with Wikipedia or citizen science, while others employ paid contributors on platform marketplaces. Crowdsourcing also spans software development, design, and research, by aggregating broad user expertise. Note that crowdfunding is related but centers on financing rather than content or tasks.

Benefits include access to diverse talents, rapid throughput, scalability, and potential cost reductions, along with greater transparency through stakeholder involvement. Challenges include variable quality, uneven motivation, and governance difficulties. Other concerns cover data quality, intellectual property, privacy, and worker exploitation in paid microtasks. Successful programs specify licensing, attribution, and clear usage terms to manage these issues.

In practice, crowdsourcing programs define objectives and evaluation criteria, and use redundancy, peer review, or automated validation to ensure reliability. The approach has influenced journalism, marketing, science, and public policy, and continues to evolve with platform design, incentives, and policy frameworks.