Beyond citizen science, the Crowdsourcing project explores the more general mechanisms of task design, incentives, and user motivation that enable effective online crowdsourcing. In particular, work within this project has explored the role of gamification in making paid crowdsourcing more effective and enjoyable for the users carrying out tasks.
This work has shown how incentives related to performance feedback, task rewards, and social comparisons can be varied to influence retention rates. Another line of work within this project has explored crowdsourcing specifically in relation to data management and curation. Here, our work has shown how changing the workflows of crowd workers enhances the quality of crowd-generated data classifications, for example in our case study of DBpedia.