The six categories of HITs

There are numerous Requesters on mTurk. However, only a few types of HITs appear over and over again.

I have categorized HITs into 6 categories:

1. Decision: In these HITs, the worker is asked to make a judgment call or to take a poll. Decision HITs usually contain radio buttons or a check list and are quick to perform. Examples of decision HITs are: Amazon's Are these items different, Powerset's Evaluate Search Results, and Content Review's Review User Submitted Images.


2. Research: For research HITs, the worker must search for information, generally on the web. The response is typically a URL, copied reference material, or data. Examples of research HITs are Amazon's NowNow Research Questions, Unspun's Find a URL/Amazon product identifier, and ClayValet's Find a product group of HITs.


3. Image Tagging: Workers interact with the picture in some way. Usually the worker is marking a set of specific features in the image. The two most common Requesters in this sub-type are Geospatial Vision (marking road features) and True Yardage (marking features on golf courses).
   


4. Transcription: Workers are asked to transcribe text from an audio or video file. HITs that ask workers to transcribe text from an image are also included.
   


5. Create: Generally a more involved HIT, these HITs require the worker to create some original content. There are many types of creation HITs. Some ask you to write an article or rewrite a sentence (e.g. ContentSpooling, Paul Pullen), create trivia questions (e.g. UQsoft), or draw something (e.g. draw).
   


6. Traffic Generator: These HITs usually are trying to generate traffic to their website. They might ask the worker to click through some links. Sometimes they require the worker to comment on a blog. Other traffic generator HITs want workers to post links back to their own websites.

These six categories of HITs encompass just about every HIT you encounter on mTurk. I'm sure there are some oddballs out there as well that don't fit these five. I just can't think of any!

You might argue that a few HITs straddle more than one category. For example, rewriting sentences generally means the Requester is using workers for Search Engine Optimization (such as ContentSpooling). Although this has the end result of traffic generation, the actual work performed is mostly a creative process for the worker. Likewise, you could argue that asking a worker to generate a list of tags for an image is a creative process -- as is crafting a response for NowNow questions. However, the former is mostly an image-based process with minimal effort and the latter takes tremendous amounts of research.

In the list of Requesters and HITs, the categories are based on the major type of work a Turker is asked to perform.