Storm crowds : evidence from Zooniverse on crowd contribution design
Sandra Barbosu, Joshua Gans
The proliferation of platforms with distributed content production has led to scholarly interest in understanding why individuals contribute. Few studies have explored the impact of platforms' architectural designs on contributions. An important design component is divisibility, the extent to which contributions can be divided into separate tasks to be performed independently, and then recombined. In this paper, we theoretically explore the relationship between divisibility and contributions and test our predictions with data from the citizen science platform Zooniverse, exploiting a format change that decreased divisibility. Post-change, editors contributed fewer \emph{total} edits, and more \emph{extended} edits than predicted in the absence of a change. They also spent less time contributing post-change. Our findings are relevant for the design strategies of many citizen science projects, as well as other crowdsourcing platforms with simple, well-structured tasks