Crowdsourcing can be a very useful tool for any company or group that needs large amounts of

quality data in order to accomplish a goal of some kind, like creating a new product for example.
For this reason, it should be made more clear to those who may have a use for it that it is a
legitimate form of data gathering. Too many people, both companies and the public are afraid to
use crowdsourcing out of the fear that the data it gathers will be inaccurate and unscientific;
however this is a misunderstanding that must be resolved so that this wonderful resource can
be used more often. Crowdsourcing has proven that it functions as intended when properly
used, even in large anonymized online crowdsourcing sites. Crowdsourcing is generally
accurate, it can gather data or turn already existing data into a useable form, and it can get work
done at around the same speed as a computer and is more accurate and effective at doing so.

Crowdsourcing can be used to gather and/or optimize data in a way that is more accurate and
efficient than other data gathering methods. An example would be a giant online survey (kind of
like a more professional twitter poll) open to anyone who wants to fill it out. This can be about
anything from a persons sleep habits to what they like to watch on TV. Not only can
crowdsourcing gather data but it can optimize it too. For example, during a massive scandal in
Britain where members of parliament were spending tax money on personal items such as
home renovations, after being repeatedly asked by the people, the government released all of
the receipts of purchases with tax money for the public to view. But the problem was that they
were all scanned in as pictures of documents and because they were pictures of text and not
actual text files, computers could not be used to quickly look through them.1 That's where
crowdsourcing came in--all of the documents were posted online for people to read through with
a handy little report button that would allow them to flag requests for money for further
investigation. Crowdsourcing can also be used for the creation of policies, in fact it was used in
Finland's constitutional reform.2 Crowdsourcing of policymaking allows citizens voices to be
heard and considered by those who represent them, which in turn allows them to introduce
better policies after taking into account the concerns of those they represent. This shows that
crowdsourcing can not only be used to gather data but to refine it too.

Crowdsourcing has proven that it can self regulate the data that it gathers, after all it was used
in the creation of Wikipedia and IMDB which are some of the most widely used sources for
information on almost anything.3 The reason that this can work is that these websites are self
regulating. Even though nothing is preventing someone from going through the Wikipedia page
of someone that they dont like and vandalizing it, there are volunteers out there who either go
through articles regularly to look for vandalism or they have created bots that flag any
suspicious edits for them to look at more closely in terms of accuracy. Wikipedia has around the
same amount of contributors as World of Warcraft has paying users. (11.5 million) 4 This system
is not perfect as some things slip through, but these incorrect edits dont stay up for long. There

1 McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. London: Vintage, 2012. Print.
2 Works Cited
Aitamurto, Tanja and Kaiping Chen. "The Value of Crowdsourcing in Public Policymaking: Epistemic, Democratic and Economic Value." Theory & Practice of
Legislation, vol. 5, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 55-72. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/20508840.2017.1282665.
3 Dashiki: Report Card. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 June 2017. <https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/reportcard/#pageviews-july-2015-now>.
4 McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. London: Vintage, 2012. Print.
are of course some famous examples of crowdsourcing creating an unwanted result, such as
the infamous crowdsourcing of a marine research vessels name, which resulted in a torrent of
suggestions to name it Boaty McBoat face5 These are not representative of the whole of
crowdsourcing, you just hear about it when it goes wrong but not when it goes right. All in all it
has been shown that crowdsourcing works properly and accurately in the field albeit with the
occasional poor results.

Crowdsourcing can also be used to get tasks done faster and better than any computer could.
This may seem ludicrous but even as computers become more and more intelligent, there are
still things that humans are better at than computers, such as spatial reasoning. Take the game
Foldit for example--the goal of Foldit is to create the most tightly packed and stable protein
structure that you can think of. The purpose of this is to study protein structures to learn more
about cancer, HIV and alzheimer's.6 This game was released into the wild, resulting in
people's efforts being sent back to the researchers who created the game, and ultimately, the
highest scoring protein shapes were then created in a lab. Crowdsourcing work may seem slow
or inefficient, but if managed properly can get the required task done quickly and with a human
touch.

In conclusion crowdsourcing can gather and optimize data, can self regulate the data that it
gathers and can get complex tasks done. In the end, crowdsourcing has its advantages and
disadvantages, like all methods of gathering data, but overall, crowdsourcing is a genuinely
useful tool and should be used more often as stating that a product was partially or completely
crowdsourced can increase sales.7 With a bit of human monitoring and some help from a spam
filtering bot to weed out inaccuracies, crowdsourcing can be useful to almost anyone who needs
data optimized, or just strait up needs accurate data fast and and at a low cost.

5 Rogers, Katie. "Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet Decide." The New York Times. The New York Times, 21 Mar. 2016. Web. 08 June
2017.l
6 "What is protein folding?" The Science Behind Foldit | Foldit. Foldit, n.d. Web. 08 June 2017. <https://fold.it/portal/info/science>.
7 Works Cited
"The Magic of Crowdsourcing." Harvard Business Review, vol. 95, no. 1, Jan/Feb 2017, p. 28. EBSCOhost,
libraries.maine.edu/mainedatabases/authmaine.asp?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=cookie,ip,uid&db=bth&AN=120353774&sit
e=eds-live.