This is a bit off-topic for this list, since it's nothing to do with
mySociety, but the people who are most likely to be able to answer my
question are probably here...
I was wondering what kind of critical mass of contributors you need to
effectively crowd-source data. Is there any kind of threshold of
contributors below which it won't work at all? Obviously, the more you
have, the faster things get done, but I'm wondering if there's some kind
of snowball effect whereby having a large number of contributors
encourages even more to join in?
To give some background on this, I run a website about listed
buildings[1] which (in theory) includes every listed building in Great
Britain. The original data is obtained from the three national heritage
organisations (English Heritage, Historic Scotland and Cadw), and
combined into a single database for display on the web.
[1] http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk
When I created the site, I had no idea either how popular it would
become (it's now far and away my most visited website), or how flawed a
lot of the underlying data is - there are a lot of factual errors in the
statutory listing data. So I'm getting a lot of complaints about the
data quality, as well as requests for more features, the most popular of
which is some form of building classification - for example, being able
to search specifically for specific categories of buildings (eg,
religious buildings, schools, railway buildings, etc), or those from a
particular era. Most of that information is in the database, but it's
not in any kind of consistent format so it's not very amenable to
automated extraction.
My thoughts, therefore, were to try to crowd-source solutions to these.
Obviously, fixing errors requires actual knowledge of the building in
question, so I'm not expecting rapid results from that, but classifying
buildings for use in a search system merely requires someone to read the
text of as yet uncategorised entries and then tag them accordingly via a
simple form. So that ought to be achievable, given enough contributors.
The question is, how many would I need, and what's the best way of
motivating them to contribute?
To give an idea of user interaction so far, compared to the number of
entries, there are just over 400,000 buildings in the database, and so
far I've had 365 user comments, 2,400 user-contributed photos and 109
user-contributed corrections to postcodes and coordinates.
Mark
--
http://mark.goodge.co.uk
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