Crowdsourcing a text corpus is not a game

Abstract

Building language corpora for low resource languages such as South Africa’s isiXhosa is challenging because of limited digitized texts. Language corpora are needed for building information retrieval services such as search and translation and to support further online content creation. A novel solution was proposed to source original and relevant multilingual content by crowdsourcing translations via an online competitive game where participants would be paid for their contributions. Four experiments were conducted and the results support the idea that gamification by itself does not yield the widely expected benefits of increased motivation and engagement. We found that people do not volunteer without financial incentives, the form of payment does not matter, they would not continue contributing if the money is taken away and people preferred direct incentives and the possibility of incentives was not as strong a motivator.