Crowdsourcing facilitates the collaborative collection of information. I believe its most important effect is avoiding the bias inherent in a single person's perspective.
Numerous events occur daily worldwide. For research purposes, it's crucial to collect historical data as comprehensively and precisely as possible, to understand how the world operates and to analyze the patterns of events. However, data collection is not an easy task. The process can involve observation, communication, surveys, experiments, and so on. All these methods require attention, time, and cost. Due to these limitations, it's challenging for a single researcher to collect massive, detailed data for many events from various, distant locations.
With crowdsourcing, the difficulty of data collection is reduced, easing both time limitations and location constraints. By collaborating with information from the crowd, researchers can acquire more data, offering different perspectives on the details of events.
The quality of crowdsourced data might be a concern. Participants in crowdsourcing might not always collect accurate data, and each of them may have a personal bias. However, if the number of participants is large enough, these biases might be mitigated by multiple observations.
Therefore, I believe crowdsourcing is always helpful for collecting information. Unlike decision-making, collecting information is more resilient to misinformation and conflicting opinions. With all kinds of information gathered, research and analysis can be conducted to determine the best course of action. On the contrary, crowdfunding is not as beneficial, since investment decisions bring direct, irrevocable consequences. It's better to maintain clear alignment between responsibility and benefit, which is often lacking in crowdfunding.
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