Crowdsourced Knowledge Acquisition: Towards Hybrid-Genre Workflows

Novel social media collaboration platforms, such as games with a purpose and mechanised labour marketplaces, are increasingly used for enlisting large populations of non-experts in crowdsourced knowledge acquisition processes. Climate Quiz uses this paradigm for acquiring environmental domain knowledge from non-experts. The game’s usage statistics and the quality of the produced data show that Climate Quiz has managed to attract a large number of players but noisy input data and task complexity led to low player engagement and suboptimal task throughput and data quality. To address these limitations, the authors propose embedding the game into a hybrid-genre workflow, which supplements the game with a set of tasks outsourced to micro-workers, thus leveraging the complementary nature of games with a purpose and mechanised labour platforms. Experimental evaluations suggest that such workflows are feasible and have positive effects on the game’s enjoyment level and the quality of its output.