crowdsourcing

English

Etymology

Coined by American journalist Jeff Howe in 2006, see quotations. From crowd +‎ sourcing, by analogy with outsourcing.

Noun

crowdsourcing (countable and uncountable, plural crowdsourcings)

1. The delegation of a task to a large diffuse group in order to introduce new or more developed skill sets and improve efficiency. There is usually no substantial monetary compensation involved.

   Synonym: open outsourcing

   • 2006 June, Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing”, in Wired‎^[1], archived from the original on 2006-07-21:

     P&G is one of InnoCentive’s earliest and best customers, but the company works with other crowdsourcing networks as well.

   • 2007 January, Jessi Hempel, “Tapping the Wisdom of the Crowd”, in Business Week:

     While not a new phenomenon, crowdsourcing is really growing as a business trend.

   • 2007 July, Twisted, comp.lang.java.programmer (Usenet):

     Costs can be reduced by crowdsourcing more content.

Related terms

• crowdworker

Translations

delegation of a task

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 眾包／众包 (zh) (zhòngbāo)

• Finnish: joukkoistus, joukkoistaminen (fi), joukkouttaminen, talkoistaminen (fi)
• French: production participative (fr) f, externalisation ouverte (fr) f
• Indonesian: urun daya
• Malay: sumber khalayak
• Norwegian: crowdsourcing (no) m or f
• Persian: جمع‌سپاری (jam'-sepâri)
• Russian: краудсо́рсинг (ru) m (kraudsórsing)
• Spanish: crowdsourcing m
• Welsh: torfoli (cy)

See also

• lazyweb

Verb

crowdsourcing

1. present participle and gerund of crowdsource