Crowdsourcing: What Really Is It?

After reading this week's reading assignments, I now understand exactly what crowdsourcing exactly is. I actually never really knew the exact meaning or definition of crowdsourcing before I read this week's articles. The word wasn't familiar to me besides that it sounds and looks like "crowdsurfing." The different articles and authors displayed their different opinion towards crowdsourcing and they discussed what they feel the definition of it actually is. I found it interesting when Dan Woods talked about what exactly the "crowd" is in his article titled "The Myth of Crowdsourcing." Woods said that there is no actual crowd in crowdsourcing. Then why is it called crowdsourcing? Woods talks about the crowd by saying, "There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field." It is interesting to think that mostly ideas just come from one individual person who is motivated and tries to expand on one simple idea.

When I first started to read about crowdsourcing, the first informative website that I thought of was Wikipedia. Wikipedia is known as the website to go to if you need a "bail-out." The reason why I used the word bail-out is because that is how I feel about the website. The website provides great information about so many wide spread topics, but most of the time you got to think to yourself, "Is this information actually the real truth?" Most professors prefer a student NOT to use Wikipedia as a source for papers whether it be a research paper, informative essay, or a persuasive essay. Woods talks about Wikipedia in his article and confirms his idea with the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, "that the vast majority are the product of a motivated individual." When I go to a Wikipedia site, I usually see so much detail and information that I think that this must of took a long time to put together with many different people. Although the idea might of been started by an individual person, "the articles are curated--corrected, improved, and extended-- by many different people."

After I got done reading Marshall Poe's article called "The Hive," I kinda chuckled at the information they pointed out. They made a Wikipedia link about themselves and after a couple days, the GUARDIANS of Wikipedia wrote to them saying, "they decided that they weren't worth knowing about" because "no real evidence of notability." The reason I found this kind of funny is because I tried this, too, when I was in high school. My friends and I made a Wikipedia page about ourselves and we actually worked pretty hard on it. However, when we went to update and look at our page the next day, it was deleted and nothing came up when we searched ourselves.

Definitely the advantages of crowdsourcing and online collaboration is the social networking information that is exchanged between people in cyberspace. A great example of this would of course be Wikipedia. A group of people gather information about a certain topic and post it for others to see who are looking to find out more information about a certain topic. A great drawback of this is what I said before about how CREDIBLE are these sources? Can you trust these "mysterious" people enough to relay their information to others or into term papers? I most of the time DO trust them, but sometimes I will go to multiple sources to make sure this information is correct. However, their sources are always at the bottom of the Wikipedia page that allows a viewer to go to the actual website where the user for the Wikipedia found their information. I believe Nicholas Carr's claim that "we overly celebrate the amateur, instead of trusting the professional, online." I will admit to doing this plenty of times early on in my college career, but I have "matured" and look for credible sources with either .org, .edu, or .gov webpages.

When talking about what is going on in Egypt, I will agree that social media has played a huge role in what is going on there. I do believe that social media is fueling the protests there and causing more drama and distress that is affecting not only Egypt, but other countries throughout the globe. http://blogs.sacbee.com/photos/2011/01/rioting-and-chaos-engulfs-egyp.html This link talks about the riots and protests in Egypt, and how they are being fueled even more. I hope they figure out the mess over there so the United States gets their nose out of there and concentrate on our own suffering economy.