Crowdsourcing 众包

Crowdsourcing 众包

Crowdsourcing is the practice of getting a large group of people, who are often strangers, to help complete a task. The process starts by dividing the task into small portions and distributing them to internet users who are willing to help. Combining each user’s results allows an otherwise daunting job to be finished quickly. Suitable tasks for crowdsourcing are often tedious but require little professional training. Combing satellite images to find an object, for example, can be impossible for a company with limited manpower, but not so if hundreds of thousands of people work on it. With the missing Malaysian Airlines flight, many net users have volunteered to help find the plane by scouring the satellite photos provided by a U.S. company, which cover the waters where the plane was last heard from.