Language Translation - The Oxford English Dictionary – a pioneer in crowdsourcing?

There is plenty of talk these days about crowdsourcing, the wisdom of crowds, and wikis. These collaborative efforts are being used to manage all sorts of information and, in the case of Facebook, even to carry out language translation. But is this phenom As VisualThesaurus.com points out in a recent interview with Oxford English Dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower, the OED has been using a type of crowdsourcing for years – originally in a very low-tech manner: “The OED is a historical dictionary, which means that for every sense of every word it contains quotations from chiefly written sources, showing how that word has been used over time. Originally the way that you would get these quotations, which are called citations, was that you simply read a wide variety of texts.  And any time you come across an interesting word, you write it down on a slip of paper…You take a file of these, you sort them into order, you divide them up into senses.  And you hav...