Ben Marwick, University of Washington; Erle C. Ellis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Lucas Stephens, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, and Nicole Boivin, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology
Hundreds of archaeologists provided on-the-ground data from across the globe, providing a new view of the long and varied history of people transforming Earth’s environment.
Large groups inherently possess more diverse knowledge, expertise and perspectives.
Tim de Groot/Unsplash
Intelligence work is no longer the sole preserve of intelligence agencies. Powerful platforms now allow everyday people to gather intelligence collaboratively – even from opposite sides of the world.
In 1906, English statistician Sir Francis Galton observed the median answer of 800 participants trying to guess the weight of a cow was accurate within 1% of the correct answer.
Mavis Wong/The Conversation NY-BD-CC
If the site is increasingly where people are getting their news, what could the company do without taking up the mantle of being a final arbiter of truth?
Imagine where working together on open data can get us?
Puzzle pieces image via www.shutterstock.com.
This method of crowdsourcing science legwork is ready to expand into other disciplines – and maybe the amateurs themselves can start calling some of the shots.
Imagine if all these people were gathering valuable data for public benefit?
Scott Cresswell/Flickr
If we can solve the privacy issues, placing trackers on people and the things we make can teach us a great deal about ourselves and the world around us.
Yes, libraries have a place and function - but academics and researchers can get along just fine without them.
REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski
Libraries are warm, dry and safe spaces with free Internet, which many people need. But academics and researchers in the 21st century can get along very well without them.
Caught in the moment, by the camera and the net.
Paul Wolfe
Some achieve celebrity, and some have celebrity thrust upon them, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This may be how Alex Geutsitskiy and Katie Verkovod feel, a couple from Oregon who were captured…
Wikipedia is often seen as a great equaliser. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people collaborate on a seemingly endless range of topics by writing, editing and discussing articles, and uploading images…
Bic is gathering handwriting samples to produce a new typeface.
Caligrafia
Pen maker Bic has been asking people around to world to submit their handwriting so it can produce what it is calling the Universal Typeface. Although the experiment is not claiming to have any scientific…
Collins, publisher of one of the world’s most well-known dictionaries, is running a competition to encourage members of the public to vote on the new words that should be included in its next edition…
The picture so far as the crowd springs into action.
Google Earth
The hunt for MH370 now involves 26 countries and an estimated 30 million square miles of terrain over both land and sea. The missing aeroplane may have continued flying for up to seven hours after sending…
Volunteers are trawling satellite imagery in the hope of finding the wreckage of MH370.
EPA
It has been nearly a week since flight Malaysia Airlines MH370 disappeared some time after taking off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Despite searches led by the Malaysian authorities, there is…
Can I interest you in the Acme Corporation? I’m hearing great things.
Rafael Matsunaga
On the morning of 22 January 2013 a story started to develop on Twitter about the imminent and unexpected resignation of Jens Weidmann, the CEO of Deutsche Bundesbank. The first documented tweet came at…
The trail of a meteor that caused some harm, but mostly helped humanity understand the meteorite strikes on Earth.
alexeya
The asteroid impact that burst over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on the morning of February 15 has provided a huge collection of new data that scientists have been analysing since. This week, three papers, two…
Wikipedia, the collection of 37 million articles that anyone can edit, is defined by conflict. The ability for anyone to shape this global repository of knowledge inevitably means that we are presented…