scripts for managing more complex tasks. The architecture of the site permits users to contribute according to their respective expertise.[1]
Like any other organizational tool, however, crowdsourced methods have weaknesses as well as strengths. Goal-setting and prioritization of work is a recurring issue for projects situated outside any formal organizational structure. For example, Wikisource, like Wikipedia or any number of similar open-content projects, has no “benevolent dictator” assigning tasks or ensuring that user effort flows to where it is most needed.[2] User contributions are largely self-directed towards those areas where their interests happen to gravitate.[3]
The problem of sustaining user engagement over time in the absence of traditional incentives (such as the payment of a salary) is also endemic to many crowdsourced projects. Users of peer-produced projects are free to come and go, and there is no guarantee that a user who launches any given project will see it through to completion. Although some users diligently perform work (such as archiving past discussions and rationalizing the site’s frequently confusing categorization structures) that improves the quality and usefulness of the site overall, most users appear to be focused on expanding the library by adding new content. In consequence, Wikisource is an unruly patchwork, with comparatively stable and well-organized content existing alongside fragmentary works organized only according to the idiosyncratic whim of a particular contributor.[4] Although Wikipedia seems not to be in any imminent danger of
- ↑ Of course, making it possible for a wide variety of users to contribute irrespective of expertise may not represent an unalloyed blessing. A certain portion of the editing work on a site like Wikisource necessarily involves correcting erroneous contributions made by inexpert users of the site, although the benefit to allowing such users to participate and thereby to acquire greater familiarity with the site’s tools and culture surely outweighs the occasional need to undo mistaken or malicious edits.
- ↑ For examples of open-source development projects that do employ management structures guided by a “benevolent dictator,” at least to help make final decisions about which contributions will be accepted into the project, see eric S. Raymond, Homesteading the Noosphere and The Magic Cauldron, in The Cathedral and The Bazaar, supra note 73, at 79, 124–26.
- ↑ This characteristic is typical of the open-source approach to development of expressive content. See Eric S. Raymond, Homesteading the Noosphere, in The Cathedral and The Bazaar, supra note73, at 100–02 (explaining open-source software development as driven, at least in part, by the satisfaction users derive from practicing skills in areas of personal interest to them); Weber, supra not e 73, at 62 (“The key element of the open source process, as an ideal type, is voluntary participation and voluntary selection of tasks.”).
- ↑ See, e.g., Aaron Krowne, Building a Digital Library the Commons-Based Peer Production Way, 9 D-lib, Oct. 2003, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october03/krowne/10krowne.html (last visited Feb. 12, 2010).
