Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

This process is often used to subdivide tedious work or to fund-raise startup companies and charities, and can also occur offline.It combines the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where each contributor of their own initiative adds a small portion to the greater result.

The term "crowdsourcing" is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing"; it is distinguished from outsourcing in that the work comes from an undefined public rather than being commissioned from a specific, named group.

The word "crowdsourcing" was coined in 2005 and can apply to a wide range of activities.Crowdsourcing can involve división of labor for tedious tasks split to use crowd-based outsourcing, but it can also apply to specific requests, such as crowdfounding, a broad-based competition, and a general search for answers, solutions, or a missing person.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) may provide one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing. In the mid-19th century, an open call for volunteers was made for contributions identifying all words in the English language and example quotations exemplifying their usages They received over six million submissions over a period of 70 years.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing.