Crowdsourcing and processing articles

• Crowd workers are not online Shakespeares, but Carnegie Mellon research shows they can write
  "(...) the research team led by Aniket Kittur, assistant professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), found that the crowdsourced articles compared favorably with articles written by a single author and with Simple English Wikipedia entries."
• Programming crowds
  "In the MIT researchers’ experiments, Soylent recruited turkers to perform two different tasks: one was to copyedit a document of roughly seven paragraphs; the other was to shorten a document. (...) the researchers found that $1.50 per paragraph would elicit good results within 20 minutes; the cost would go down to about 30 cents per paragraph if the user was willing to wait a couple hours."

Mind you that the first research itself has a bit xkcd feel to it in the ingenious sense. These are milestones which are worth remembering, because it'll only get steeper in the coming years - trust me. The whole process may also remind you of a Rube Goldberg machines, but quality assurance and scalability is difficult to manage otherwise.

What's next, generating your PhD thesis?