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The internet: The idea of “crowdsourcing”, or asking crowds of internet users for ideas, is being tried out in some unusual quarters

WHEN the British government established the Longitude prize in 1714, offering a cash prize for a simple and practical way to determine the position of ships at sea, it was ahead of its time. Rather than funding a single research scientist to solve the problem, it adopted an approach that has lately become known as “crowdsourcing”. Jeff Howe, who coined the term in an article in Wired in 2006, defined it as “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

As the Longitude prize shows, the idea is not new. But it has been given new power by the internet, which makes it cheap and easy to apply the crowdsourcing approach in all sorts of unexpected areas. The compilation of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written and edited by its users, is the best-known example, but there are many others. The Library of Congress asked users of Flickr, a popular photo-sharing site, to identify unknown people in its old photo collections. Within days, distant relatives and acquaintances had identified hundreds of people in the pictures. Volunteers have helped astronomers sort millions of galaxies in the “Galaxy Zoo” project, in which participants are asked to classify images of galaxies, captured using telescopes, into one of a handful of categories. (This is something that software is bad at, but humans find easy.) ...