Crowdsourcing For Dummies

Chapter 16

Combining Microtasks and Preparing Workflow

In This Chapter

Understanding parallel and serial tasks

Checking for errors

Bringing together parallel and serial tasks

Making decisions in workflow

Microtasking takes some effort, there’s no doubt about it. You have to design your tasks, upload them to a microtask market, let the crowd do its work, check the results and then download the work that meets your standards. (See Chapter 8 for a discussion of how to microtask.) With all this to do, you could be forgiven for wanting to keep your microtasking job as simple as possible. After all, why would you want to make it more complicated? Well, of course you should keep your microtasks as simple as possible, but sometimes the very simplest microtasks aren’t the best. Simple microtasks may be easy to design and easy to start, but they can only do simple things.

Checking the results of microtasks can take real effort. You have to review each task to be sure that the work’s done properly. When you’ve uploaded a large number of tasks, you quickly learn that checking the results of ...