Crowd Sourcing

Building data sets is expensive and time consuming. That is, if you hire experts. But what if you open your project to anyone who is interested in helping via crowd sourcing?

The results can be both awesome and potentially threatening. The White Glove Tracking Project illustrates how a bunch of techies with ample free time can synergize their efforts. Companies like Lego, BMW and Muji innovate products and services through crowdsourcing. The scientific community has begun harnessing the power of the masses for tasks like crater finding and bird identification. Even user testing can be crowd sourced. I think anyone would be hard pressed to say that completing huge amounts of work in record time is a bad thing. What some might take issue with however is the quality of work done by anyone. A lack of authority can be freeing, but are data and products produced without credentials reliable?

Quality aside, there are other potential pitfalls to crowd sourcing. Even if all the work is done for free or at very low cost, it’s still necessary to pay for the aggregation and cleaning up of the data at the project’s conclusion. There is also unfortunately the risk of faulty results caused by targeted, malicious efforts or just laziness.

What would happen if you employed crowd sourcing techniques to add commentaries to the Bible, or even create new translations? Or better yet, what if crowd sourcing was used along side credentialed experts to provide a mixture of authoritative as well as populist interpretations?

With the Tagged Tanakh, crowd sourcing is allowing us to discover new theories and ways to connect with Torah. Is crowd sourcing dangerous? Is it good for the Jews?

In this age of instant gratification we’ve become accustomed to getting information on anything quickly and easily. This grab and go mindset is now permeating all facets of society. What happens when scholarly interpretations, traditional rabbinic sources, and Torah tweets live side by side? We hope that the Tagged Tanakh will point to an answer.