Crowdsourcing

Whitford (2007) mentions that the term crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe, a writer in Wired magazine. It is "the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call." Examples of crowdsourcing on Web 2.0 social networks are social bookmarking sites. Libert & Spector (2008) also cite Wikipedia as one successful example (p.3).

Although Wikipedia is an example of a project of collaboration, it is not a commercial project, the collaborators don't receive any payment and the donations are used to cover the site maintenance and other associated costs, it is possible that the position of it's founder against using the term crowdsourcing to describe Wikipedia is that the term has a very strong commercial dimension.

Nevertheless, going back to the Wikipedia case, it is an example of a collaborative effort in which a huge community is responsible for writing the encyclopedic entries and maintaining quality control. In this context, it is a good thing if they can control vandalism and the entries can achieve sufficient scientific accuracy; but Roman (2009) mentions that crowdsourcing has a weakness: "there is no clear difference between the wisdom of the crowd and the mob that rule" and that "doesn't really help sort through or synthesize information, in fact, it might do the opposite" (p. 1).

Crowdsourcing is a relevant trend on the Web 2.0 nowadays, so it could be interesting to know users' opinions on it and how it relates to the different perspectives discussed in this section. The relationship between information behavior and crowdsourcing would be if the user participates in a crowdsourcing project and how and why he or she does it.