In my most recent post “Turkopticon: Defender of Amazon’s Anonymous Workforce” I introduced Turkopticon, the social art project designed to provide basic tools for Amazon’s massive Mechanical TURK workforce to share information about employers (requesters).
Turkopticon, has a been a runaway success with nearly 285 thousands reviews submitted by over 17 thousand reviewers since its inception in 2009. Collectively these reviews make up 53 million characters which maps to about 7.6 million words as 5 letters per average word plus two spaces. At 100 words every 7 minutes this represents approximately 371 days collectively spent just writing reviews. It is probably safe to considered this estimation an underestimation.
So given this massive investment of individuals in writing these reviews, I find myself wanting to ask, “who is investing this kind of energy producing this public good?”
In general, while there are many contributors, 500 contributors represent 54% of the reviews written. With the top 100 reviewers making up 30% of the reviews written and the top 15 representing 11% of all reviews written.
| Figure 1: Using this graph we can find the Gini coefficient for number of submissions at around 82% indicating that a very few individuals are doing nearly all of the work. |
Within Turkopticon there is no ranking system for reviwer quality so it is not obvious who are the top contributors and what their reviewing patterns look like. In this article we will examine some general features of the top contributors.
Table 1: A list of the Top 15 Turkopticon review contributors. Rank is the reviewer rank by number of reviews written. Name is the reviewer’s name. Nrev is the number of reviews written. DaysTO is the number of days between the oldest review and the most recent review. Nchar is the average number of characters written in …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com