Crowd Sourcing: A double edged sword

The internet has allowed users with incredibly diverse viewpoints and backgrounds to connect with each other on a grand scale. The possibility of collaboration on such a scale is a double edged sword. Less controversial crowdsourcing projects (Netflix project, game modding projects) generally have the most to gain, while more controversial projects (Wikipedia definitions/entries, voter based social news sites) often get bogged down by all the noise created (trolls, flame wars, etc.).

In his 2005 TED speech, Howard Rheingold points out that open source projects can often relate back to the "Prisoner's Dilemma," (game theory). If a business decides to compete non-openly , they run the risk of losing out because of a competitors superior intelligence. Competing openly (open source) allows both businesses to reap the benefits of each other's intelligence, but in return offers less room for growth in market dominance. Forbes Magazine's Dan Woods writes in an article entitled, "The Myth of Crowdsourcing" that

"The word crowdsourcing has created an illusion that there is a crowd that solves problems better than individuals. There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing."

This is certainly true with Wikipedia, where founder Jimmy Wales has admitted that one percent of the user base is responsible for creating roughly fifty percent of the sites contents. Netflix's million dollar prize competition for creating a better algorithm is an odd example. In the end, the team that won the prize was made up of groups that had started the project separately. When these groups figured out that their solutions were not good enough, they pooled together and defeated the leading team. Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for connecting experts and virtuosos together for projects such as Netflix's.

Nicholas Carr's claim about overly celebrating the amateur is half valid in my opinion. With Carr's point about Wikipedia being "Factually unreliable," and that some of the writing is "Appalling," it drives home the fact that amateur's often create more problems than they solve on sites like Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales explains that users with over a hundred submissions tend to be more helpful than the ones with less, who often delete more content than they add. Wikipedia is a great starting point for conducting research, there are often plenty of links to traditional sources at the bottom of each page. Sometimes amateurs create wonderful works of art through crowdsourcing, as is the case with the website StarWarsUncut.com where users have uploaded short video clips for recreating specific parts of the actual Star Wars films. Spliced together, these clips create a very entertaining version of the original film. The video-game community has benefitted immensely from crowdsourcing as well. The game Counterstrike was originally created from a modified version of another game called Half-Life. Using the internet to openly collaborate on modifications of games has spawned the Steam download portal program. Steam allows small game developers to sell or give away copies of their games over the internet in one centralized marketplace. Professional developers have been rewarded for making their source-code open-source by gaining creative mods that ultimately inspire the next version of the game and give the developer free input on what gamers really want.

The events in Egypt have spurred their people to turn to social sites such as Facebook and Twitter for organizing demonstrations and informing news agencies around the globe about the remarkable events taking place. With the Egyptian government shutting down the country's internet service, citizens have been forced to meet in public, which as John Hudson points out in the article entitled, "The 'Twitter Revolution' Debate: The Egyptian Test Case" might be a bad choice made by Mubarak.