Storm crowds: Evidence from Zooniverse on crowd contribution design

What is the impact of platform design on crowdsourcing contributions? The proliferation platforms with distributed content production, such as Wikipedia, Zooniverse, and others, has led to scholarly interest in understanding why individuals contribute them. One stream research investigated contributor motivations, while another growing stream, scattered across several disciplines, explored effect contributions. important element extent which incomplete, or partial, contributions are possible - a concept we refer this paper “tolerance incompleteness.” We explore relationship between crowds’ willingness context world’s largest citizen science platform. Our quasi-experimental empirical approach exploits format change that decreased tolerance incompleteness one Zooniverse project. results difference-in-differences estimation show after change, editors contributed fewer total edits, but more complete edits than predicted absence change. Users also spent less time contributing project post-change. Moreover, find trade-off quantity quality lower findings have implications for number involve simple, independent, well-structured tasks. • Platform impacts contribute, informing strategy. A natural experiment provides causal evidence. Design changes cause quantity–quality tradeoff