The term crowdsourcing was coined by the US-Journalist Jeff Howe, as he wrote an article with a title the Rise of Crowdsourcing, analyzing the versatile relation between Internet and the crowd’s knowledge production in various fields.

Currently crowdsourcing is understood (very broadly) as a sourcing model, in which individuals or groups, organizations access ideas, knowledge, services or goods. It is most likely internet based, however, the practice of crowdsourcing existed before the digital era as well. (for instance, the publication Oxford English Dictionary of the 1884, in which 800 volunteers catalogued words to create the first cluster of the OED.)

Meanwhile, various research projects had been carried out on different crowdsourcing platforms, demonstrating how difficult is to give an definition on this phenomenon: In 2008, article, Daren C. Brabham, and writer of the 2013 book, Crowdsourcing, defined it as an "online, distributed problem-solving and production model." 2017 Kristen L. Guth and Brabham, found that the performance of ideas offered in crowdsourcing platforms are influenced not only by their quality, but also by the communication among users about the ideas, and presentation in the platform itself.

In the scientific literature crowdsourcing is seen as related to the citizen´s science, respectively as citizen´s participation in the scientific (academic) knowledge and data production. A good example for that relation is a historic one: after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, volunteers from all over Europe reported their experiences to help researchers create an early version of a map that estimated the intensity of the event. The most obvious benefit of crowdsourcing is that it can be used to help collect large amounts of data in real time at lower costs than traditional approaches. The “power of the crowd”, when combined with modern information and communication technologies, is the ability to conduct simple tasks such as measurement or observation at scale by enlisting large numbers of participants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkwhUOQ3nYg

Source:

Jeff Howe. The Rise of Crowdsourcing. WIRED, https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds/

Brief history of Crowdsourcing

https://web.archive.org/web/20150703041454/http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/a-brief-history-of-crowdsourcing-infographic/12532

Brabham, D. C. (2008). "Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving an Introduction and Cases". Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 14 (1): 75–90.

Guth, Kristen L.; Brabham, Daren C. (2017-08-04). "Finding the diamond in the rough: Exploring communication and platform in crowdsourcing performance". Communication Monographs. 0 (4): 510–533.