The IQ of the crowd: Understanding and improving information quality in structured user-generated content

摘要

User-generated content (UGC) are various forms of digital information such as comments, forum posts, produced by members of the general public/ contributors (i.e., the crowd) rather than employees with an organization. UGC supports decision making and analysis in several contexts of business applications and it is a growing trend to mine UGC for unanticipated insights. However, UGC also poses some risks such as control over the content or form of data supplied, lack incentives to contribute and differences in perception of the contributors. As a result, crowd information quality or crowd IQ, may have impact on decision making. The present research work focuses on another largely ignored factor influencing IQ in UGC called as conceptual modeling. Conceptual modeling represents knowledge about a domain. A theoretical foundation for crowd IQ and the propositions about the impact of conceptual modeling on important IQ dimensions. Three experiments based on a citizen science project in the natural history domain were tested on the hypotheses derived from the propositions. The implications of the work in terms of future of the user generated content, on crowd IQ, have been discussed.