Stuff-getting and People-joining

Based on an XKCD comic, the Up-Goer Five text editor only lets you write using the one thousand most common words in English. Here are my attempts to describe what I do in crowdsourcing and information retrieval using only common words.

Information Retrieval

How do you find something from a lot of written stuff? If there are hundreds of things or more, you can’t look at all of them! One way we can find things is to use the words to understand the ideas. Then, when you search with a question, we can find the ideas that you are asking about and find the written things that answer your question. However, words and ideas aren’t exactly the same thing, so we look for ways to make better how a computer understands the ideas in your question and in the stuff you’re looking through.

Crowdsourcing
When people get together on computers, they make fun, cool, and strange things. My job is to understand why they do it, and how we can can work together to fix problems in the same ways.