Tasks of a Different Color: How Crowdsourcing Practices Differ per Complex Task Type and Why This Matters

Wang, Yihong; Papangelis, Konstantinos; Lykourentzou, Ioanna; Saker, Michael; Chamberlain, Alan; Khan, Vassilis-Javed; Liang, Hai-Ning; Yue, Yong

Abstract

Crowdsourcing in China is a thriving industry. Among its most interesting structures, we find crowdfarms, in which crowdworkers self-organize as small organizations to tackle macrotasks. Little, however, is known as to which practices these crowdfarms use to tackle the macrotasks, and this goes hand in hand with the current practice of the HCI research community to treat all forms of complex crowdsourcing work as practically the same. However, macrotasks differ substantially regarding structure and decomposability. Treating them under one umbrella term - macrotasking - can lead to an imprecise understanding of the workforce involved. We address this gap by examining the work practices of 31 Chinese crowdfarms on the four main macrotask types, namely: modular, interlaced, wicked, and container macrotasks. Our results confirm essential differences in how these nascent crowd organizations address different macrotasks and shed light on what platforms can do to improve the uptake of such work.

Citation

Wang, Y., Papangelis, K., Lykourentzou, I., Saker, M., Chamberlain, A., Khan, V.-J., Liang, H.-N., & Yue, Y. (2023, April). Tasks of a Different Color: How Crowdsourcing Practices Differ per Complex Task Type and Why This Matters. Presented at CHI '23 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Hamburg, Germany

• Presentation Conference Type: Edited Proceedings
• Conference Name: CHI '23 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Start Date: Apr 23, 2023
• End Date: Aug 28, 2023
• Acceptance Date: Jan 13, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Apr 19, 2023
• Publication Date: Apr 23, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jul 21, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 8, 2023
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Article Number: 297
• Book Title: CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 9781450394215
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581418
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/19788916
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581418