Waisda?: Video Labeling Game

 The Waisda? (which translates to What’s that?) video labeling game was launched in May 2009 by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in collaboration with the Dutch public broadcaster KRO. It invites users to tag what they see and hear and receive points for a tag if it matches a tag that their opponent has entered.

Waisda? is the world’s first operational video labelling game. The underlying assumption is that tags are most probably valid if there’s mutual agreement. Over 2,000 people played the project and within six months, over 340k tags have been added to over 600 items from the archive.

Initial findings have been published earlier, when the pilot period was still running. A recent evaluation report (PDF download, in Dutch), includes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the tags, as well as a usability study of the game environment and a study into the incentives that apply to people playing the game. The evaluation report provides evidence that crowdsourcing video annotation in a serious, social game setting can indeed enhance retrieval of video in archives. It features success factors organizations need to take into account in setting up services that aim to actively engage their audiences online.