Amazon Mechanical Turk
| Website | www |
|---|---|
| Alexa rank | 5,330 (September 2016[update]) |
| Current status | Live |
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace enabling individuals and businesses (known as Requesters) to coordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is one of the sites of Amazon Web Services. Employers are able to post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service, or, more colloquially, Turkers) can then browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a monetary payment set by the employer. To place jobs, the requesting programs use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site. Requesters must provide a billing address in the USA, Australia, Canada or the UK in order to submit a request for tasks to be completed through the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site.
The name Mechanical Turk comes from "The Turk", a chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, which was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen. It toured Europe, beating both Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It was later revealed that this "machine" was not an automaton at all, but was in fact a human chess master hidden in the cabinet beneath the board and controlling the movements of a humanoid dummy. Likewise, the Mechanical Turk web service allows humans to help the machines of today perform tasks for which they are not suited.
Workers set their own hours and are not under any obligation to accept any particular task. Because workers are paid as contractors rather than employees, requesters don't have to file forms, nor pay payroll taxes, and they avoid laws stipulating conditions regarding minimum wage, overtime, and workers compensation. Workers, though, must report their income as self-employment income. The average wage for the multiple microtasks assigned, if performed quickly, is about one dollar an hour, with each task averaging a few cents.
...
Wikipedia