Note: This article was constructed as part of Reporter's experiment in crowdsourcing. For further explanation, go here.

Crowdsourcing: Every student, bored worker, and internet-wandering teen's best friend. Crowdsourcing is the massively collaborative creation and distribution of knowledge facilitated by the internet. It's possible to burn hours upon hours clicking links from Batman > Secret Identity > Zorro > Anthony Hopkins > Greenpeace, gaining trivia from a loosely held strand whose beginning is hard to recall.

In the 15th century, mass distribution of knowledge was enabled by the early printing press. The first pages and books off the press were referred to as "incunabula" (in swaddling clothes) as they were artifacts of a new, under-developed technology. Yet, the mass distribution of knowledge enabled by the press (and copied by radio and television) inspired radical transformations — the Protestant reformation being one of the first examples. Today, the internet is in a similar incunabula-state, yet it will have just as much of an effect on our culture.

The Long Tail

“The Long Tail” was a phrase first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon or Netflix, that sell massive numbers of unique items in relatively small quantities.

In the past, most products were made to fit “the average person.” The concept of a normal distribution came from suit tailors in the early 1900s who wanted to mass produce dress shirts. They created a distribution of shirt sizes and made the sizes that fit the most people.

Using the long tail, products can now reach the outer edges of the distribution. Much of the mass customization we see takes advantage of this; for example, the NikeID website allows users to pick custom colors for their Nikes. If they were to use the most popular user-created designs for their new model, they would be benefiting from the power of crowdsourcing. That is the beauty of crowdsourcing: It gives access to the long tail, allowing ideas to be drawn from every person, not just the vocal majority.

This graph shows user contributions to the wiki from start to finish of the public editing period. Each color corresponds to one user/IP address.

Mass Amateurization

Marketing directors love the long tail, but the concept is useful for everyone. If you wanted to get 20 good pictures of the Grand Canyon, would you go online or would you fly someone out to Nevada to take them for you? That's the power of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing allows for mass amateurization. By uploading pictures and comments and stories, we are contributing to the wealth of knowledge that is available to anyone. We are the first source, and, as a result, our work as amateurs has become much more important.

Read-Write Culture

Larry Lessig from Harvard University (formerly Stanford) explains that the effect is a movement from a read-only to a read-write culture. That is to say, before the internet, the creation of knowledge was limited to a select few: Those who had access to tools for media creation and distribution. The mode of communication that ensued from this model is referred to as one-to-many, with one author and many readers. With the internet, the tools for creating and distributing knowledge are in many more hands. The mode of communication that ensues from this new model is referred to as many-to-many, with many authors, and many readers. A significant outcome of many-to-many communication is that we have much tighter feedback loops compared to traditional, broadcast one-way media. These tighter loops enable masses of individuals to play and engage in a more rapid development of the co-creation of knowledge.

Pitfalls of Crowdsourcing

There are a number of aspects to crowdsourcing that need to be worked out before corporations will consider adopting them on a large scale, and they differ by industry. Let's look at the newspaper industry. If newspapers are crowdsourced, how will they make sure the participants aren't making false accusations (or libel) of public figures? If anyone can write about the president, how do they make sure writers from the crowd are not mixing opinions with facts?

Traditional forms of content-gathering and distribution may be threatened by crowdsourcing, but crowdsourcing is also threatened by the status quo. Consider what institutions have done in the past when something new threatens their existence, or threatens the existence of a whole industry: They lobby the government, an activity with which corporations have been relatively successful in the past.

Crowdsourcing asks a lot of the individual. This is unfortunate, because most individuals are lazy. We grow up in a world that asks little of us in terms of creation and demands our complicity in the gross consumption of mediocre media. While it's nice that some people have risen above that, these people stand very far apart and are generally idealistic and ineffectual. It should also be noted, not without a hint of irony, that crowdsourcing is vulnerable to the chaos factor that some people find so entertaining. For instance, this author. I guess this is the part where I draw a penis or something like that as a hilarious juxtaposition to the heavy tone that precedes this unfunny, self-aware paragraph, but I'm going to have to draw your attention to that whole treatise on human laziness and just put a couple of curse words here: shit damn piss dick bitch ass tits fudge.

In addition to all these problems, when someone comes up with the next big invention, the practice of social production dictates that they share it with the world — not only the final product, but also instructions so that anyone can replicate it. This is done for the general advancement of society, so that those who can make improvements will be able to do so. But what about monetary gain from intellectual property?

Trade secrets do not easily mesh with the idea of social production and crowdsourcing. This is why patents were created — to allow inventors to profit from intellectual property. But social production is changing the paradigm. Social production works when people are willing to do things for the advancement of humankind for free or low cost. The reward is a feeling. Yochai Benkler, Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, says that this is exemplified by people participating "for 5 minutes, just because it's interesting, just because it's fun, just because it gives [them] a certain sense of meaning, just because it gives [them] a certain set of social relations."

Examples of Uses

Businesses and organizations on the internet are taking to crowdsourcing in a big way. In fact, you have almost certainly been a part of some company's crowd. Logged on to Amazon lately? Amazon is America's largest online retailer, and for good reason; they have nearly $15 billion in annual revenue. When you browse their products, make a purchase or post a review, you are helping them arrange their storefront. Amazon makes use of user contributions and actions to give future customers a better idea of the product, who likes it and what people thought of it.

Dell's Ideastorm (http://ideastorm.com) is a crowdsourcing application to determine what products are most wanted. Wikipedia is arguably a form of crowdsourcing, although founder Jimmy Wales disagrees: "This idea that a good business model is to get the public to do your work for free — that's just crazy. It disrespects the people. It's like you're trying to trick them into doing work for free." Amazon, Cafepress, and Threadless could also be argued as forms of online crowdsourcing in the way users generate products, reviews and ratings.

Have you signed up for an account online and had to decipher the fuzzy letters and numbers in a box to prove you are a human? Many websites use this means of user verification called a CAPTCHA, or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” A project called reCAPTCHA (http://recaptcha.net) has taken advantage of the crowds of users deciphering letters to help digitize old books. Scanned words that optical recognition software is not able to read are given to users to transcribe. This way, the power of the masses is put to good use by archiving historical literature.

Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing is considered a definitive book on crowdsourcing. In the book, he talks about a crowdsourced journalism project he tried that failed miserably. Luckily, he also talks about why it failed miserably, so that people can learn from his experience.