We've all heard of crowdsourcing in the past. Groups coming together to pool resources, whether those be time, energy, knowledge, money, etc. Most of us think of things like GoFundMe, which is monetary crowdsourcing, however there is a great field of academic crowdsourcing that the average person isn't familiar.
"DescribeMe" is one of those types of websites. It's main intent is to take it's vast content of historical documents and artifacts and make them accessible to those who are blind or have low vision. The process is frankly very simple. You are presented with a picture of either a document or artifact/item and in a very short summary, you are to describe it. It sounds easy, right? And for the most part it is, however there are moments that become very difficult. When you are faced with a page that is taken out of context, with a lot of information on it that you are having to interpret, the "three to seven words" limit becomes more taxing than anything else.
It feels as though sometimes when defining things, you are out of your depth. These things may require more knowledge than you (as a non-professional) would have easy access to. This kind of issue made, at least to me, the situation a little concerning. I found myself often asking how useful my interpretations of documents were when I couldn't understand them at all myself.
But then again, maybe I was over-analyzing the purpose of the interpretations. The tricky thing about crowdsourcing like this is that it so much is up to untrained persons, that sometimes, when delicacy is required, the real use of the project may be muddled.