I used MTurk for a data gathering project recently. Turnaround time is 
great: within a few hours. You can set params to only accept people 
whose rejection rate is 5% or less or what not (95% acceptance rate is 
the default) to weed out the riffraff. Pretty cost effective.

My instructions were complex (check websites A, B, and C and on each, 
look for data elements X, Y and Z and do the hokey-pokey and...) and as 
a result the quality wasn't great. To avoid: I'd recommend either 
farming out each subtask into a separate HIT or aggregating the entire 
task in a single HIT.

    --SET


Aaron Rubinstein wrote:
> I'm looking at Amazon's Mechanical Turk, https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
> to "automate" checking the page order of 11,000 scanned books (some were
> scanned backwards by a long out-of-business vendor).
>
> Does anyone on the list have experience using Mechanical Turk?  This is a
> time sensitive project so I was hoping to figure out some best practices for
> attracting Requestors, and maybe even a sense of how quickly tasks might get
> accomplished. 
>
> Thanks, 
>
> Aaron  
>
>