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Why I Hate Mechanical Turk Research (and Workshops)
Eytan Adar

There is a certain enthusiasm in any community when encountering a new tool—a shiny new instrument that appears to solve hard problems—that leads to a barrage of research “results.” However, by rewarding quick demonstrations of the tool’s use, we fail to attain a deeper understanding of the problems to which it is applied, to pursue real solutions rather than stopgaps, or to develop a real understanding of the tool’s limits. In this paper I argue that we are currently experiencing these failures in our focus within crowdsourcing (both crowdsourced science and the science of crowdsourcing) but that there are still some interesting research trajectories available to us. They just might require significant work and produce the most dreaded of research outcomes: negative results.




PDF (172Kb), to appear at the CHI2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation