Making Crowdsourcing More Reliable

From Wikipedia to relief efforts after natural disasters, crowdsourcing has become a powerful tool in today's connected world. Now an international team of researchers including a computer scientist at the University of California, San Diego, report they have found a way to make crowdsourcing more reliable. They describe their findings in the Oct. 10 issue of the open access journal PLOS ONE . It's all about checking for accuracy, the researchers say. If the information submitted is not accurate, the source, and the person who recruited them, doesn't get paid. "We showed how to combine incentives to recruit participants with incentives to verify information," said Professor Iyad Rahwan of Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, a co-author of the paper.