A gamification approach for the improvement of paid crowd-based labelling of geospatial data

Abstract. Non-commercial, unpaid crowdsourcing is the basis of many non-profit projects on the Internet such as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. A prerequisite for such projects to be successful is to find a sufficient number of volunteer crowdworkers who are intrinsically motivated to participate. In the field of geodata collection, many tasks exist that in principle could be solved with crowdsourcing; however, finding a large number of volunteers is problematic. There is also paid crowdsourcing in addition to crowdsourcing based on voluntary collaboration. The main incentive for participating in paid crowdsourcing projects is primarily payment for the work. Thus, intrinsic motivation is replaced by extrinsic motivation. However, intrinsic motivation simply replaced by extrinsic motivation can lead to a reduction in performance. If there are no additional intrinsic incentives in addition to monetary payment, it can happen that crowdworkers only perform exactly as much work as is necessary to satisfy the employers. Gamification may positively influence the motivation of paid crowdworkers. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether it is possible to increase the performance of paid crowdworkers with gamification. To this end, we have developed a web-based tool for the labelling of 3D triangle meshes. We presented this tool with and without game elements to paid crowdworkers and investigated to what extent gamification influenced the quality and quantity of the collected data.