New auto-crowd tech writes better articles than pro writers TRUE

Crowdsourced teams can write informational articles better than what single individual journalist writers can, say scientists at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Human-Computer Interaction Institute (CMUSCSHCII) which is a top institution of human-computer interactions science.

"This is exciting because collaborative crowdsourcing could change the future of work," Aniket Kittur said. "We foresee a day when it will be possible to tap into hundreds of thousands or millions of workers around the globe to accomplish creative work on an unprecedented scale."

Kittur is an assistant professor at the CMUSCSHCII, first name Aniket. We don't know if this is a woman or a man.

A statement says:

Kittur, along with Robert Kraut, professor of human-computer interaction, and Boris Smus, a student in HCII's joint master's degree program with the University of Madeira, have created a framework called CrowdForge that breaks down complex tasks into simple, independent micro-tasks that can be completed rapidly and cheaply.

{We think the others are definitely men.}

It goes on:

"Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell, San Francisco-based science journalists, have created a blog that will explore the use of CrowdForge for preparing science news articles based on research reports."

There is a crowdsourcer thing already, Amazon's "Mechanical Turk". People who do jobs on MTurk are called "turkeys".

Turkeys won't do long jobs like writing an informational article as the pay is chickenturkeyfeed.

"But much of the work required by real-world organizations requires more time, cognitive effort and coordination among co-workers than is typical of these crowdsourcing efforts," Kittur said. Most turkers, for instance, refuse long, complex tasks because they are paid so little in return, says the statement from CMUSCSHCII.

CrowdForge uses turks as if they are PCs in a distributed cluster like SETI@home, but people not PCs. This can be called turking the people.

Each low-paid turkey does a different part of the informational for a few cents each. European readers: there are 100 cents in a US American dollar, which is worth a variable amount compared to your Euros pounds roubles etc.

Kittur Kraut Smus describe proved that turking is better than paying lazy hacks:

In preparing five such articles on New York City, this method required an average of 36 sub-tasks for each article, at an average cost of $3.26. The articles averaged 658 words. The researchers then paid eight individuals $3.05 each to produce short articles on the same subjects; the average length was 393 words. When 15 people compared the articles, they rated the group-written articles of higher quality than those produced by individuals and about the same as a Wikipedia entry on the topic [that costs nothing]. The variability - the range from the best to the worst article - was lower for the crowdsourced articles.

By paying less, amazingly the professor scientists found they got less good informational articles.

Even more amazing is the fact that starving turked beggars will write anything at all for less than a cent a word.

When the brothers find out who they are words will be had FREE CONTENT.

"We used MTurk as a source of workers," he (Kittur dead man FREE CONTENT) noted, "but other users might tap into writers and researchers within an organization or into an existing network of freelancers."

Read all about it (link deleted FREE CONTENT).

[Can we have our 50p now please. So cold and hungry thank you] ®