[giarc]

I dealt with something similar. I was creating a large directory of childcare centres in Canada. I had thousands of listings with a url but no email address. I created a Mechanical Turk job to ask turkers to go to website and find an email address. Many came back with email addresses like admin@<<actualURL>>.com. After checking a few, I realized that the turkers were just guessing that admin@ would work and I'd approve their work. I ended up having to double check all the work.

[visarga]

> I ended up having to double check all the work.

Me too, different project and different labelling company but the conclusion - it's better to do it in house. Labelling is hard. You need to see, talk with and train your labelling team.

[kolinko]

That’s why you always set up layers of work with mturk, with other layers validating the first ones. Or give the same task to multiple workers and compare the results.

[giarc]

For getting email addresses when I had a url, it would have likely been easier to set up a scrapper to visit page and pull any string with an @ in it. Then scroll through the list to find the most obvious general intake email.

[xvector]

I wonder if those workers can be reported and fired.

[giarc]

It was quite a while ago so I don't remember what my options were. If I recall correctly I was able to see individual workers responses, so once I found one that was obviously faking results, I was able to reject all their submissions.

[csunbird]

I mean, depending on how the OP phrased the work to be done, they probably did valid work.