THIS means tapping a large group of people for a task typically handled by one person or a small group of domain experts.

Think Wikipedia articles written by contributors, and Google maps edited by users.

Although there are also experts in the crowds, they are mostly made up of amateurs.

Crowdsourcing is particularly effective nowadays because of the networked world.

These days, the crowds can be easily assembled via the Internet.

But crowdsourcing does not always come free. For example, Amazon's Mechanical Turk pays users for a wide range of tasks, such as matching product pictures to the correct webpages.