Citizen science, also known as crowdsourcing, is on the increase, and is being written about in scholarly journals.

"Citizen science refers to voluntary participation by the general public in scientific endeavors. Although citizen science has a long tradition, the rise of online communities and user-generated web content has the potential to greatly expand its scope and contributions. Citizens spread across a large area will collect more information than an individual researcher can. Because citizen scientists tend to make observations about areas they know well, data are likely to be very detailed ... We describe the problem in the context of a research project that includes the development of a website to collect citizen-generated data on the distribution of plants and animals in a geographic region." So write Roman Lukyanenko, Jeffrey Parsons and Yolanda Wiersma in their 2011 article, Citizen Science 2.0: Data Management Principles to Harness the Power of the Crowd.

If you want an example of citizen science in action, look at Galaxy Zoo. This project harnessed the power of thousands of ordinary people to classify millions of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a survey which obtained images of more than a quarter of the sky and created three-dimensional maps containing more than 930,000 galaxies. Within 24 hours of launch, Galaxy Zoo was getting 70,000 classifications an hour. More than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people.

Crowdsourcing works.