[salman89]

I thought about this too, ideally you would want to use crowdsourcing to just gather evidence and let professionals who are also liable to sift through the evidence. Another angle to work is to allow the crowd to analyze the evidence but not make that analysis public. Problem boils down to incentive - if your contributions are not made public and there is no attribution, is the motivation still there? 4chan is probably more interesting to look at in this regard, since all posts are anonymous.

[prof_hobart]

Some of this could potentially be solved by having the crowdsourcing contributions filtered/moderated by the professionals (e.g. not getting posted publicly until a pro has read it, and "voting" done or at least swayed, by the pros).

The question is whether the time spent doing this moderation would be better spent actually doing the investigations themselves.