[byoung2]

It depends...

If you are just looking for top 10 lists, it should be fine. If you want detailed reports like WikiTravel (http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page), you'll have a harder time finding people who can write well for a low price.

Mechanical Turk is like any other system of inputs and outputs: what you get out of it depends on what you put in. From my experience, if you give very detailed instructions and examples of what you want, and you pay a decent reward, you'll get good results. If you want people to write 500 word articles for $0.05, you'll get crap.

[saracen75]

Thanks byoung.

I am prepared to pay well for really interesting and refreshingly novel activity alternatives. I know that it will be hard to find good writers from MT, but I what I really want is just basic information like what, where, when, how much, and the website link or contact if available.

What I am not sure about is whether giving detailed description and parameters for the job, together with a reasonably good reward, will be likely to produce reasonably good results...

What about any alternatives to MT that you know of?

[byoung2]

Here's one technique I've had success with on MTurk. I needed 500 descriptions written (250-350 words each) so I created a test hit with just 25 assignments. The reward was $2 with a $1 bonus for excellent work. I got about 10 really good results, the rest were average to terrible. I feel bad about not paying people unless they just didn't follow the instructions or they plagiarized, so I ended up paying everyone. For the 10 excellent results, I paid them the $1 bonus, and in the bonus message, I told them to contact me for more assignments. For the 3 that contacted me, I worked out a flat rate to write 50 at a time.

You can also use Elance to find writers, but these tend to be more expensive.