[okfn-labs] Crowdcrafting + reference lists = crowdsource lists of stuff?

[Tom Morris]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 10:26 AM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:

> Agreed that canonical reference data should be authoritative rather than
> opinion based. ;-)
>
> I'm talking more about using standard reference lists (e.g. counties in
> the world, cities or counties in the UK) to then generate new lists which
> may not be 'reference data' per se - like 'Twitter account for every local
> education authority' or 'URL of national contact point for multinational
> corporation X'.
>
> Generally this would be a way to get a piece (or several pieces) of data
> for every item you had on a given list. A recent use case would be wanting
> to get the Twitter accounts for a given list of climate change denial think
> tanks [1].
>
> What do you think? Useful/not useful? Perhaps Google Docs is the easiest
> and best way to do this for now?
>

Microtask sites are used for this kind of work all the time and you can get
it done pretty cheaply.  In additional to Twitter accounts, people use this
technique for lists of home pages, customer service phone numbers, etc,
etc.  The disadvantage to using Crowdcrafting specifically is that it has
no user base, so you'd need to organize your own volunteers, whereas if you
used Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, etc you'd have a waiting army of people
to do your work.  You would need to pay them, but only pennies.

For your specific task of finding Twitter handles for organizations, I'd
first see if I could get a list of home page URLs using Freebase, DBpedia,
or Wikipedia and then set a scraper running on that list of URLs to see how
many Twitter handles I could scrape automatically.

Tom
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-labs/attachments/20130221/a534c8dc/attachment-0002.html>