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extended-abstract

Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in mechanical turk

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing system in which tasks are distributed to a population of thousands of anonymous workers for completion. This system is increasingly popular with researchers and developers. Here we extend previous studies of the demographics and usage behaviors of MTurk workers. We describe how the worker population has changed over time, shifting from a primarily moderate-income, U.S.-based workforce towards an increasingly international group with a significant population of young, well-educated Indian workers. This change in population points to how workers may treat Turking as a full-time job, which they rely on to make ends meet.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '10: CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2219 pages
ISBN:9781605589305
DOI:10.1145/1753846

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 10 April 2010

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Author Tags

  1. crowdsourcing
  2. demographics
  3. human computation
  4. mechanical turk
  5. user surveys

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CHI EA '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 350 of 1,346 submissions, 26%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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