How to ensure the correctness of data collected through crowdsourcing?

Question

I have a website where users enter data on some products that they buy.

How to ensure the correctness of the entered data using crowdsourcing (allowing users to vote / edit products), minimizing the amount of work that the administrator must perform? I am looking for some practical recommendations, best practices, etc.

Answer 1

Because high-level data can be collected from the “crowd” with an appropriate value of correctness. Looking at SO, a response or a response from someone with 1000+ rep is more likely to be a casual user. Look for checks and triangulation, if this is one voice in the crowd you are listening to, then it is probably not worth it. If other voices join in, you know that on something, again in SO terms, we all have a chance to ask questions again.

I recently saw some really good iPhone apps that rely on crowd sources for their data and then test it out, asking other users if they are right.

Answer 2

What data do you collect?

You are talking about a source crowd, and therefore (I assume) aggregating data for that crowd. Since they talk about the products they buy, I suspect that you are going to use the attributes and prices of the product.

Some possible approaches. If users enter non-numerical data (e.g. colors), simply record the most common entries or the mode (most frequently entered).

If they enter numerical data, cancel outliers. those. the lowest and highest results, and on average the rest (you can do it at prices, say, this is the approach that electronic exchanges use to solve the closing price of many transactions).

Depending on your application, you may want to have a historical bias regarding recent entries.

But it all depends on your application and on the amount of storage and crackling data that you are ready to do.

Answer 3

Make sure you keep a log of IP addresses with every action, malicious users or bots trampling session data or cookies. This ensures that a single object cannot distort any results or do something radical if it has multiple users.