Presence of an ecosystem: A catalyst in the knowledge building process in crowdsourced annotation environments

The phenomenal success of certain crowdsourced online platforms, such as Wikipedia, is accredited to their ability to tap the crowd's potential to collaboratively build knowledge. While it is well known that the crowd's collective wisdom surpasses the cumulative individual expertise, little is understood on the dynamics of knowledge building in a crowdsourced environment. A proper understanding of the dynamics of knowledge building in a crowdsourced environment would enable one in the better designing of such environments to solicit knowledge from the crowd. Our experiment on crowdsourced systems based on annotations shows that an important reason for the rapid knowledge building in such environments is due to variance in expertise. We use, as our test bed, a customized Crowdsourced Annotation System (CAS) which provides a group of users the facility to annotate a given document while trying to understand it. Our results show the presence of different genres of proficiency amongst the users of an annotation system. We observe that the crowdsourced knowledge ecosystem comprises of mainly four categories of contributors, namely: Probers, Solvers, Articulators and Explorers. We infer from our experiment that the knowledge garnering mainly happens due to the synergetic interaction across these categories.