There are different opinions on why crowdsourcing information is a good thing or not:
Jay Doubleyou: why wikipedia is so good
One place where information is crowdsourced is the online dictionary:
Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Urban Dictionary: online crowdsourcing
There are lots of academic studies:
Urban Dictionary (UD) is a website where users of the website generate definitions to slang words and phrases, or alternative definitions to known words. Users also generate examples usages of the defined word. Additionally, other UD users can vote on how accurate they believe a definition is, by giving the definition either a thumbs up or thumbs down.
Frontiers | Mining a Crowdsourced Dictionary to Understand Consistency and Preference in Word Meanings
It is controversial in how it crowdsources its information:
"Urban Dictionary: Crowdsourced Appropriation" by Emma Rashes analyzes “crowdsourced appropriation” on the popular website Urban Dictionary, arguing that the site’s irregular algorithmic behavior, and its founder’s misunderstanding of African American Vernacular English, create pathways for anti-Black and misogynistic mis-definitions to circulate even as they produce profit for the company.Urban Dictionary: Crowdsourced Appropriation | The Word: Tha Stanford Journal of Student Hiphop Research
Although there has been a response:
Urban Dictionary wipes offensive, racist definitions for 'aboriginal' | Mashable
Here's a good overview:
The Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced website that records new words and their meanings. It began life in 1999 as a parody of Dictionary.com but has since become an important resource on the Web. Indeed, judges in the U.K. famously used the site in 2005 to help them understand slang used by two rappers involved in a dispute.
Part of Urban Dictionary’s appeal is its informal approach, which allows both definitions and descriptions of words. It even allows opinions, which can sometimes be offensive. It captures new words quickly and registers many of the variations that emerge over time. A voting system allows users to show admiration or disdain, revealing words’ popularity.
Today, many millions of users rely on the site to keep them up to date with slang, common usage, and popular culture.Of course, Urban Dictionary has its shortcomings. In the absence of style guides, editors, and moderators, the content can be vague and inaccurate. Also, little is known about the people who post new words and whether the entries reflect real changes in the language or just those that affect a small subset of people.
So just how good is the Urban Dictionary at capturing new words, and how does it compare with more conventional approaches to producing online dictionaries?
Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Dong Nguyen at the Alan Turing Institute in London and a few pals, who compare the Urban Dictionary and its content with Wiktionary, another crowdsourced dictionary. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of Urban Dictionary at this scale,” they say.
Wiktionary is an interesting comparison because it takes a much more formal approach to crowdsourcing. This is a sister site to Wikipedia, run by the same Wikimedia organization. It records only word definitions and employs guidelines about how these should be compiled. It also guides users as to what constitutes a definition. Moderators edit the content, control vandalism, and aim to generate high-quality results. Unsurprisingly, Wiktionary has also become an important online resource, one that researchers increasingly use for natural-language processing and so on.
,,,
The Anatomy of the Urban Dictionary | MIT Technology Review
And here's another:
The Internet facilitates large-scale collaborative projects and the emergence of Web 2.0 platforms, where producers and consumers of content unify, has drastically changed the information market. On the one hand, the promise of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ has inspired successful projects such as Wikipedia, which has become the primary source of crowd-based information in many languages. On the other hand, the decentralized and often unmonitored environment of such projects may make them susceptible to low-quality content. In this work, we focus on Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced online dictionary. We combine computational methods with qualitative annotation and shed light on the overall features of Urban Dictionary in terms of growth, coverage and types of content. We measure a high presence of opinion-focused entries, as opposed to the meaning-focused entries that we expect from traditional dictionaries. Furthermore, Urban Dictionary covers many informal, unfamiliar words as well as proper nouns. Urban Dictionary also contains offensive content, but highly offensive content tends to receive lower scores through the dictionary’s voting system. The low threshold to include new material in Urban Dictionary enables quick recording of new words and new meanings, but the resulting heterogeneous content can pose challenges in using Urban Dictionary as a source to study language innovation.Emo, love and god: making sense of Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced online dictionary | Royal Society Open Science
As to whether the Urban Dictionary is any 'good', it is a matter of opinion of course.
There's a lot of snobbery:
Is Urban Dictionary an acceptable source? - English Language & Usage Meta Stack Exchange
Maybe it's not the best place for young people - which will mean that young people will head to it:
Parent reviews for Urban Dictionary | Common Sense Media
Here's what a more 'controlled' crowdsourcing platform has to say:
Urban Dictionary - Wikipedia
Here's an article in praise of it, if a bit old:
In praise of urban dictionaries | Written language | The Guardian
And here's a look at how good the dictionary is:
16 Times Urban Dictionary Defined Words Better Than The Oxford Dictionary - Capital XTRA
But it does excite interest in words - for example:
Urban Dictionary: coffee
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