[WikiEN-l] Mechanical turks (was: Re: Almeda University paying for positive Wikipedia edits)

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/12/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I agree fully.  If I were to somehow arrive at a large pile of money I
> didn't need, paying people to edit Wikipedia is one of the first things
> I would use it for (along with paying people to code on a few choice
> Free Software projects, most likely).

Yeah. For a bit of fun I was just investigating the idea of using
Amazon's mechanical turk (mturk.com) to pay people to carry out boring
work on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, I don't live in the US so can't
actually it out. But maybe someone else would like to. The idea would
be something like

1. Submit a "human interaction task" like "find an unsourced article
and add one web based source which backs up the material in the
article".
2. 100 users perform that task once each.
3. Each user submits the diff of their work to prove what they did.
4. Each successfully-performed task earns the worker 10c, and costs
the submitter 11c.

This kind of thing is actually *very* easy to set up. I would be very
keen to hear if someone is interested in trying it.

Steve
PS I hope this doesn't turn into the worst case of WP:BEANS ever :(