Operation War Diary - Case Exercise

Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe, author of the seminal Wired article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing", was an attempt to explain the trend among internet companies in the first half of the 2000 decade of tapping into their own public for content. in a 2008 article for Convergence, Daren Brabhan of the University of Utah defined it as "an online, distributed problem-solving and production model".

Many different definitions exist, but in a nutshell, any initiative, network or service where content or other facet of the product(s) is/are created by the general public can be defined as a type of crowdsourcing. Many of these include gaming components (badges, scores, etc) to generate incentives to users.



Some examples:

Foursquare

A location-based social networking where users "check-in" to venues. The gamified interface drives users to input information on their favorite places, generating a comprehensive database of the best places in town that can be filtered by interest.

Reddit
A news and entertainment website where users generate the content, comment and also vote news stories up and down, effectively replacing all parts of the editorial team.

Quirky
A website where users create new products that the company later manufactures and sells. Users suggest products, vote for features and even choose the name, price and tag lines for the ones that finally go on sale.

Wikipedia

One of the most accessed websites in the world, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia created and maintained by it's own users, who edit articles, verify sources and self-regulate the behavior of their own colleagues.

Operation War Diary brings this approach to cataloging and categorizing the diaries of several British military units in the First World War. These diaries are part of the National Archives catalog and are being digitized as part of the 100th anniversary of the Great War.

Users get access to these digitized diaries and, in turn, tag the pages indicating what parts of the pages refer to which days, every time a person is mentioned (first name, last name, rank and reason for being mentioned), any time a given place is mentioned, to what category a given entry belongs etc. This information will enable the researchers at the National Archives to better index and analyse the content of all the diaries being digitized.

In Wikipedia, where user-generated content is directly available to other users and affects the experience. For this reason, there's need for moderation (reviewing, content control and reversion of modifications) to control the quality of the generated content. In Operation War Diary, the quality of the content is obtained through redundancy: as many different users will tag the same pages, the level of confidence on any given piece of content can be measured by how many users agree or disagree on it. This way, the more users collaborate, the more trustworthy the final content is.

References

Brabham, D.C. Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14(1), February 2008.

Howe, Jeff. The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired., 2006.

Deterding, S. et alli. "From game design elements to gamefulness: Defining "gamification"". Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference. pp. 9–15, 2011

Oomen, J., and Aroyo, L. "Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities and challenges." In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, pp. 138-149. ACM, 2011.

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