Crowdsourcing

   The definition of "crowdsourcing" by Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers” It doesn’t necessarily have to be an online community; it can just be a community in general or a large sample of people. The example we saw in class where people had to guess the weight of a cow at a fair was shocking to me and a little hard to believe. The average from the crowd’s guesses turned out to be one number off from the actual weight of the cow. That is astonishing but I think it could have been luck. One thing that I wish they did was replicate this same experiment at different cities or with a different crowd of people and see if the results would be similar.

   I do believe that the concept behind crowdsourcing works and is accurate the majority of the time. This is evident in gameshows such as “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and the newer, popular game “HQ.” For those skeptics who either don’t understand or don’t believe that crowdsourcing I research and found an excellent example that thoroughly details and walks you through the process on how crowdsourcing works.

Which person from the following list was not a member of the Monkees?

(a) Peter Tork

(b) Davy Jones

(c) Roger Noll

(d) Michael Nesmith

Not knowing the answer, they “ask the audience” for the answer. Assuming there’s an audience of 100, the following is a rough analysis of how crowd manages to select the correct answer (which is “c” Roger Noll by the way!)

   7 people are Monkees fans and know Roger Noll was not a member of the Monkees (but an economist at Stanford)

   10 people recognise 2 of the names on the list as being in the Monkees, leaving Noll and one other. Assuming they pick randomly, this gives another 5 votes to Noll.

   15 people recognise only 1 of the other names, which leaves another 5 votes for Noll.

   The final 68 people have no clue at all, so randomly pick a name splitting the votes evenly across the names, giving Noll another 17 votes.

   Adding up all these votes, gives Noll 34 votes in total, with the other names getting around 22 votes each (as statistical law suggests).

   This means that even though 93 percent of the audience didn’t know the answer, and were basically guessing, the crowd (the audience) when combined picks the right answer.