In a 2006 Wired Magazine article, Jeffo Howe defined 'crowdsourcing' the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated employee and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call."

The best way to understand crowdsourcing is to imagine the following experiment. You have a vase full of marbles and you want to find out how many are in there without taking them out and counting them one by one. Therefore you ask a lot of people. Of all the guesses that you receive, you start to notice a cluster of guesses around the right answer. Wikipedia works similarly, as there are a lot of people editing the same pages. It is the 'law of large numbers' applied to many different texts on the web. 

Why is this important to the Language and Literature course? As we study the conventions of various text types, we explore the relation between form and content. The content of many webpages is affected by the medium in which they are published. If there are multiple, anonymous authors, such as we see on Wikipedia, we see a product that is generic. The principle of 'crowdsourcing' has led to this result. Hypertext literature, where multiple authors write different endings to works of fiction online, could only be possible with hyperlinks. In brief, "the medium is the message" as Marshal McLuhan once said.

Here is a short video from Jeff Howe explaining crowdsourcing in person.

Related lessons

• The Internet