This is an article about "distributed human projects." The
http://www.dmoz.org yahoo-like directory is one of them with 34,000
editors participating.
Mind Over Matter: Online volunteers donate their brainpower for
interests of science
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/tech/867163
A few quotes:
"Open Mind volunteers can take part in more than 25 online activities to
create a sort of common-sense database, feeding information into a
computer based on tasks that range from the straightforward (listing
objects that appear in a picture) to the thoughtful (teaching the
computer about people's goals and desires). Eventually a computer with
a modicum of common sense could be used for a variety of purposes,
including vastly improved Web searching."
"These collaborations are widely viewed as the next step in
distributed-computing projects, which break down complex computations
into many smaller tasks that are then parceled out via the Net to
volunteers' computers. The PCs work on the tasks when idle. Such
projects have become quite common, attracting millions of volunteers to
endeavors like scanning radio-telescope signals for alien messages and
cracking data-encryption codes."
"I've estimated that something like 100 million mouse clicks have been
wasted on Solitaire," Stork said. "Instead of just playing a game, Web
volunteers could be helping science or contributing to the world's
largest software endeavor."
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