Wikipedia's Use of Crowdsourcing

Wikipedia is edited and improved by the use of crowd work, which is ''“the process of taking tasks that would normally be delegated to an employee and distributing them to a large pool or online workers or the crowd, in the form of an open call”''.

Some people dedicate their lives to writing Wikipedia articles, with a total of six users having edit more than one million articles. Amongst them and other Wikipedia users, there are people who edit Wikipedia non-stop, even without getting monetary compensation, up to the point where they ignore their jobs. This unhealthy crowd work system of Wikipedia has been an issue economists in the Digital Labor Economy sector has been trying to solve.

The following is the current Wikipedia method of editing. An outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.