when the crowd (as in 'crowdsourcing') is moron
So this is the story: two days ago a terrible earthquake hit the area around L'Aquila.
The two major italians newspapers (Corriere della Sera and Repubblica) asked their readers to contribute with pictures, videos and comments. The approach seems to me quite normal and efficient since in such scenario the contributions of many people who are actually in the area are much more relevant than what could be provided by 1-10 journalist(s).
So, what happened? Some guys had fun sending pictures taken after the earthquakes in Turkey and China. Corriere.it published the pictures on its homepage and some italian bloggers are taking the piss out of its journalists.
PaulTheWineGuy is one of them : since he's continuing to remove my comments (2 so far...) on its blog [ 
], I'll post my thoughts here (that's my blog gods-damn-it! :).
So, the point is either contributions in real-time without any
"precautionary" filter (well, we're not talking about goatse here) or wait to update the website until every
picture/video is reviewed.
What kind of review? Check on google image or flickr to see if some reader have sent fake pictures? I tried searching for "earthquake" on google image and none of the two pictures is in the first 5 pages.
Come on.
UPDATE 7 April 2009, 10.45: my comments have now appeared on PaulTheWineGuy's page...
UPDATE 7 April 2009, 14.52: Marco Pratellesi, from Corriere.it, write about this topic and explains why they had to refuse any additional contributions from the readers. Let's say a big thanks to the morons.