Is Wikipedia Crowdsourcing?

In my previous post about crowdsourcing I interpreted the definition of the term narrowly, to refer specifically to when a company outsources a task to the crowd. So Wikipedia wouldn't be crowdsourcing because the tasks done by Wikipedians aren't being organized or directed by a formal organization.

I used to use the term much more broadly to refer to various types of online collaborative processes, including projects like Wikipedia. I also noticed that my classmate Nisha referred to Wikipedia as an example of crowdsourcing on her blog.

My guess is that most people use the term in the latter fashion, to describe all sorts of online collaborative projects, regardless of whether or not they are directed by a formal organization.

But I now think I prefer the first, more narrow definition. I like that it refers to a specific type of collaboration and that it excludes Wikipedia, which I think could be better described using another term. (My vote is for 'commons-based peer production' though I know it's a mouthful.)

Obviously there isn't a right or wrong definition. But which is more useful? Is it worth restricting the use of crowdsourcing for the sake of clarity? Does it even matter?

*UPDATE* I should have mentioned from the outset... the issue of how the project is licensed seems relevant to this discussion. Think Creative Commons and the GNU General Public License versus proprietary projects/content controlled by companies or other organizations.

Crowdsourcing turned inside-out

This is a long post, so let me summarize: crowdsourcing lets companies outsource tasks to the crowd. But there's another new production model that does just the opposite by allowing communities to outsource tasks to corporations (without paying them a dime.) Interested? Read on.

According to Jeff Howe, the author who coined the term, "crowdsourcing" is defined as "when a company takes a job that was once performed by employees and outsources it to the crowd." Threadless, an online t-shirt store that Howe uses as an example, harnesses a community of artists to design its shirts. The community votes on the designs, and artists whose designs receive the most votes win a cash prize. In this model, the company draws on the ideas of the crowd to create products and services on which they can profit.

Another example of crowdsourcing is Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for "Human Intelligence Tasks," where companies pay workers across the globe to complete minor tasks for which computers are ill-suited. (More about Mechanical Turk here.)

It's easy to see why this model would appeal to corporations. Crowdsourcing allows them to gather ideas for products and services, and even to complete mundane tasks, all at little or no cost.

Yet while companies are harnessing the crowd to increase profits, the crowd has also demostrated its ability to coordinate on its own, without a corporation to guide its work. Wikipedia is a classic example of this sort of commons-based peer production, in which people come together to create something useful without the structure of a traditional organization.

Author Clay Shirky has written a book on this subject entitled Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In it he demonstrates how the internet increasingly allows large groups to coordinate effectively without help from organizations. (Shirky discusses the basic premise of his book in short videos here and here.)

While Wikipedia may allow users to collaborate without the guidance of a corporation, some open source projects completely invert the logic of crowdsourcing by opening up the collaborative process such that corporations actually work for the community without being paid.

Linux, the open source operating system, receives contributions of code from many talented programmers, all over the world, driven by a diverse range of motivations. Many of those contributors work for companies that depend on Linux, and thus pay their programmers to contribute to the project.

Just as corporations can outsource tasks to communities of users, so too can open-source communities outsource tasks to corporations. Both models are fairly new. My bet is that both will grow in importance in the coming years. But is one more important, or more promising, than the other? Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Assorted Links

Don't judge a post by its comments - Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber responds to Ezra Klein about the relationship between quality blog posts and number of comments.

Brevity didn't start with Twitter. - from The Smart Set, via NYT's Ideas of the Day

Teaching kids Twitter and Wikipedia in school. - The Guardian reports on teaching primary school kids "modern media and web-based skills."

Online or in person? We can (and do) have it both ways

A few of my classmates have written posts that seem to suggest a trade-off between interactions in person and interactions online.

Brightinspiration says "actual physical engagement amongst people is much more effective than virtual."

Zaid asks "does all this virtual activity replace the traditional networking methods of going to an event and meeting a person face to face?" and answers that "In a way, yes it does."

Bronislava worries that people are no longer comfortable confiding in each other and instead only trust their keyboards.

It seems to me that the underlying assumption in all of these posts is that online interaction takes place at the expense of in-person interaction, and vice versa. I think it's worth pointing out that in practice this doesn't seem to be the case.

A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that:

Contrary to fears that email would reduce other forms of contact, there is “media multiplexity”: The more contact by email, the more in-person and phone contact. As a result, Americans are probably more in contact with members of their communities and social networks than before the advent of the internet.

In his book The Wealth of Networks, Harvard's Yochai Benkler surveys the literature and comes to the same conclusion:

Relations with one's local geographic community and with one's intimate friends and family do not seem to be substantially affected by Internet use. To the extent that these relationships are affected, the effect is positive....
...Connections with family and friends seemed to be thickened by the new channels of communication, rather than supplanted by them. (Chapter 10)

This fits with how most of us use the internet, and with how we use social networking. Online communication supplements in-person interaction. We keep up with friends whom we might otherwise see only once a week or month using Facebook, Twitter, and email.

Just as online communication supplements in-person interaction, online communities frequently organize in-person meetings to strengthen their online ties. The progressive blogosphere comes together annually for Netroots Nation (formerly YearlyKos) and countless groups use Meetup.com to coordinate meetings and events offline.

Here's the best part... Where do we get all the extra time to augment our relationships with email and social networking, according to Benkler? By watching less TV!

Fun With Social Network Theory

What better way to dive into social network theory than to apply it on our very own network: the ITEC656 class blogs.

If the nodes in this network are the blogs of the class participants, what sort of network are we dealing with? Is it ego-centric? Socio-centric? Open-system?

Well, depending on the types of connections we are interested in, it could actually be described as any of these. Ego-centric networks are connected by a single node or individual. In the case of the ITEC656 blogs, they are all connected by Prof. Melander.

We could also classify our blogs as a socio-centric, or closed system network, because we are all students in the same class. Finally, since we are publishing content alongside of every other blogger out there on the web, we could also be considered nodes in that massive and amorphous network, "the blogosphere", an open-system network.

As the class goes on and we link to and comment on one another's blogs for the class, I'd love to see a map of how that network develops. Does anyone know of any good software for this purpose?

Welcome to Walter's ITEC656 blog!

This is my blog for ITEC-656-001B, Social Networking and Business, at American University's Kogod School.

I'll be posting [at least] weekly for the course.

On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own.