This. And pay good turkers accordingly. The average HIT is comically bad paid. Do people think that paying 20 cents for a job that takes 15 minutes to be well done will get them good work?
As a requester I'm aiming for federal minimum wage which, to my knowledge, is above average, but still very low of course. Most turkers are doing a tremendous job, but there are also quite a few bad apples who are consistently trying to cheat. It's amazing how much thought some people invest in finding ways to cheat when they could just do the freaking task. I'm not just losing data because of these people, I also have to screen the all data incredibly carefully. As a requester, I have to price this in and this hurts honest turkers. I feel sorry about this, but I just can't justify paying as if everyone was doing great work.
If min wage is say $7.25 an hour, which is what you aim to pay turks... but then you end up throwing away 2/3 of your work (say have 3 turks do each piece to validate they did it right).... why not hire 1 local person for $15 an hour? Decent wage, less total money (15 vs $22 an hour), and likely better results.
I didn't see an answer to this ... so I'll take a stab at it.
One advantage of using a turk is it's on an as needed basis. Hire someone for 1 hour, 1 week, or even 1 month of what used to be called "piecework".
That's quite different than hiring a person locally. Where can you find local people to do piecework? It's quite likely the task or tasks envisioned don't constitute full time or even part time employment. They're just one-time tasks.
Maybe temp agencies still supply people for jobs like this? But you're limiting yourself to a small pool of people unless you're in a big metropolitan area or unless there's a University with a large group of hungry students nearby.
Two reasons: 1.) Data collection on MTurk is much faster because many people can work in parallel on the task. 2.) I'm doing academic surveys and need data from as many different people as possible.
AFAIK, you can filter 'bad' turkers (by country, performance, etc) and inform good ones that HITS are available. By the other hand, if you pay decently, turkers will be afraid to loose that income source and will perform their best. (Disclaimer: I've made some HITS in a distant past.)
