5What is crowdsourcing
5 What is crowdsourcing? How does the site Galaxy Zoo manage crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. While this definition from Merriam Webster is valid, a more specific definition is heavily debated. The process of crowdsourcing is often used to subdivide tedious work and has occurred successfully offline−see the examples below. It combines the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where each contributor of their own initiative adds a small portion to the greater result. The term "crowdsourcing" is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing"; it is distinguished from outsourcing in that the work comes from an undefined public rather than being commissioned from a specific, named group.
Galaxy Zoo
Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scientific research. There have been seven versions up to July 2014, which are outlined in this article. Galaxy Zoo is part of the Zooniverse, a group of citizen science projects.
How It works
Galaxy Zoo recruited volunteers to help with the largest galaxy census ever carried out. Opening the project to amateurs saved the professional astronomers the job of studying all the galaxies themselves, and it meant that the project could classify over 900,000 galaxies in months rather than years. Computer programs had been unable to reliably classify galaxies: several groups had attempted to develop image-analysis programs. Kevin Schawinski stated: "The human brain is actually much better than a computer at these pattern recognition tasks." However, volunteers astonished the project’s organizers by classifying
Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. While this definition from Merriam Webster is valid, a more specific definition is heavily debated. The process of crowdsourcing is often used to subdivide tedious work and has occurred successfully offline−see the examples below. It combines the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where each contributor of their own initiative adds a small portion to the greater result. The term "crowdsourcing" is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing"; it is distinguished from outsourcing in that the work comes from an undefined public rather than being commissioned from a specific, named group.
Galaxy Zoo
Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scientific research. There have been seven versions up to July 2014, which are outlined in this article. Galaxy Zoo is part of the Zooniverse, a group of citizen science projects.
How It works
Galaxy Zoo recruited volunteers to help with the largest galaxy census ever carried out. Opening the project to amateurs saved the professional astronomers the job of studying all the galaxies themselves, and it meant that the project could classify over 900,000 galaxies in months rather than years. Computer programs had been unable to reliably classify galaxies: several groups had attempted to develop image-analysis programs. Kevin Schawinski stated: "The human brain is actually much better than a computer at these pattern recognition tasks." However, volunteers astonished the project’s organizers by classifying