Crowdsourcing
obtaining services, ideas, or content from a group of people, rather than from employees or suppliers
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.
Advantages of using crowdsourcing include lowered costs, expandable knowledge bases, improved speed, improved quality, increased flexibility, and/or increased scalability of the work, as well as promoting diversity. Crowdsourcing methods include competitions, virtual labor markets, open online collaboration and data donation. Some forms of crowdsourcing, such as in "idea competitions" or "innovation contests" provide ways for organizations to learn beyond the "base of minds" provided by their employees (e.g. Lego Ideas). Commercial platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, match microtasks submitted by requesters to workers who perform them.
The public source identifies “Crowdsourcing” as obtaining services, ideas, or content from a group of people, rather than from employees or suppliers. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Crowdsourcing, obtaining and services.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Crowdsourcing”, the useful work is to connect “obtaining services, ideas, or content from a group of people, rather than from employees or suppliers” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q275969. The Library of Congress control number is sh2017004056. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Crowdsourcing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.