Crowd-sourcing is a genius idea for tapping into many different people for accomplishing a big task through small increments. In it's essence, crowd sourcing is an incredibly simple idea, but when applied correctly and to a large amount of people, it can be an efficient engine producing amazingly large creations.
I think Wikipedia is the most impressive crowd-sourcing feat, having a constantly revised and updated encyclopedia readily available to many people is an invaluable tool. I don't use Wikipedia for actual scientific research in my oceanography major, but if I need to quickly read up on a topic and have a general understanding, I'll go there. While people sometimes say "just google it" most of the time google points to Wikipedia and that just shows how impressively large Wikipedia has reached. Also another cool fact about Wikipedia, you can download a text based version that can fit on a typical flash drive. So essentially, you can have the majority of human knowledge readily available at your finger tips thanks to millions of people coming together and collaborating and refining this encyclopedia. That's just impressive.
Crowd sourcing to create visuals is also a cool method of crowd-sourcing. It definitely removes all control over the visual aspect of what something will look like, but it can provide a unique touch to the video that cannot be replicated. The movies that were crowd sourced come to mind, such as the star wars remakes, and the Robocop remake where the film is given a completely new tone and feeling, but it still is the same exact movie as the original. Again just the little inputs from everyone helping to create a centralized product makes for a definite interesting visual and end result.
Crowd-sourcing is a genius idea that when applied right can be incredibly effective in distributing a large task over a large amount of people, which in turn makes the task each individual has to do, relatively small. It's a genius way to use the internet and a genius way to tap into millions, if not billions, of people online.
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