# Running a Study on Prolific and MTurk

Source: https://www.potatoannotator.com/docs/guides/crowdsourcing-prolific-mturk

**Crowdsourcing platforms like Prolific and Amazon Mechanical Turk give you access to many annotators on demand. Potato integrates with both: participants click through from the platform, do the task, and return with a completion code.** The hard part isn't the wiring, it's quality control and fair treatment of workers.

See [crowdsourcing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing) and [Amazon Mechanical Turk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk) for background. For the integration reference, see [MTurk Integration](/docs/deployment/mturk-integration) and Prolific integration in the deployment docs.

## How the flow works

1. You deploy a Potato task on a public URL.
2. The platform sends each participant to that URL with their ID in the link.
3. Potato records annotations against that ID.
4. On finish, Potato shows a completion code the worker submits back to the platform to get paid.

Potato captures the participant ID from the URL so annotations tie back to the right worker automatically.

## Quality control is non-negotiable

Open crowdsourcing attracts some low-effort and automated responses. Build defenses in from the start:

- **[Attention checks](/docs/guides/gold-standards-and-attention-checks)** to catch workers who aren't reading.
- **[Gold standards](/docs/guides/gold-standards-and-attention-checks)** to score accuracy against known answers.
- **A [training/qualification phase](/docs/features/training-phase)** so only workers who pass reach the real task.
- **[Overlap](/docs/guides/how-many-annotators)** so you can measure agreement and aggregate.

## Treat workers fairly

This is both ethical and practical, well-paid, well-briefed workers produce better data:

- **Pay at least a fair hourly rate.** Time your pilot to estimate how long the task really takes, then price the reward accordingly.
- **Write clear instructions** and a short consent/intro. See [Writing Annotation Guidelines](/docs/guides/writing-annotation-guidelines).
- **Respond to questions** and pay promptly; reputation affects who takes your future tasks.

## Further reading

- [MTurk Integration reference](/docs/deployment/mturk-integration)
- [Deploying an Annotation Server](/docs/guides/deploying-annotation-server)
- [Gold Standards and Attention Checks](/docs/guides/gold-standards-and-attention-checks)