Crowdsourcing Blockchain
To improve the quality of the supervised learning algorithm for geoparsing on books.geocode.xyz, we’ve developed a crowdsourcing game on geocode.xyz/GameON.
The player reads an excerpt from a book, which may or may not mention a certain location. For example:
Then, a “Yes/No/Not sure” answer is given and the next excerpt is shown.
If a second player is shown the same excerpt and gives the same answer as the first one, then both players are awarded a full credit.
However, if the second player contradicts the first one, no one gets a credit.
If a third player provides an answer that agrees with player 1, but disagrees with player 2, both player 1 and player 3 get 2/3 of a credit, while player 2 is subtracted 1/3 of a credit.
The majority wins and the minority loses.
The “Yes-No-Yes-Not sure” answers are stored in a Blockchain, which decides retroactively who wins/loses credits.
Eventually players are distinguished between those who are usually right and those who are not. When a player with a good answer record on this blockchain provides a new answer, that answer carries greater weight than the answer of a new player, or a player with a poor record.
The blockchain awards credits based on the history of all answers, from all players, going back to the beginning of the game.
The excerpts provided are sometimes right and sometimes wrong (e.g. half the time, the location extracted from the text is not an actual location in that context). This means that there is no benefit to an attacker who just answers the questions at random to gain credits without contributing meaningful data to the project (e.g., because the attacker will win credits half the time and lose them the other half).
Some excerpts are too ambiguous even for a human reader to establish location context. So, a third button (“Not sure”) addresses this situation. Pressing this button skips to the next excerpt. For example:
Not being sure by pressing “Not sure” is also a valid answer, and players will get points if other players are not sure also.
You may customize your game by asking the system to show excerpts that mention certain place names, or locations in a certain country, region or continent. Focus your input on your area of location expertise, places you have visited or places whose history you know well.
Go ahead and play the game on https://geocode.xyz/GameON
Read Book Excerpts — or whole books. Read books about your chosen places. Earn geocoding credits for the Geocode.xyz premium API.
