Month: July 2019

It is not uncommon for projects that collect crowdsourced data to be commissioned with incomplete knowledge of data contributors, data consumers, and/or the purposes for which the data collected are going to be used. Such unanticipated uses and users of data form the basis for open information environments (OIEs), and the information collected through systems designed to gather content from users have high quality when they are complete, accurate, current and provided in an appropriate format. However, as it is assumed that experts provide higher quality information, many types of OIEs have been designed for experts. In this paper, we question the appropriateness of this assumption in the context of citizen science systems – an exemplary category of OIE. We begin by arguing that experts are primarily efficient rule-based classifiers, which implies that they selectively focus only on attributes relevant to their classification task and ignore others. Drawing from existing literature, we posit that experts’ focus on only diagnostic features of an entity leads to a learned inattention to non-diagnostic attributes. This may improve the accuracy of the information provided, but at the expense of its completeness, currency, format and ultimately the novelty (for unanticipated uses) of information provided. On the other hand, we predict that non-experts and amateurs may use rules to a lesser extent, resulting in less selective attention and leading them to provide more novel information with less trade-off of one dimension of information quality for another. We propose hypotheses derived from this view, and outline two experiments we have designed to test them across four dimensions of information quality. We conclude by discussing the potential implications of this work for the design of crowdsourcing platforms and the recruitment of experts, amateurs, or novice data contributors in studies of data quality in crowdsourcing settings.