Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is fortunate to be powered by a large and diverse group of Worker customers who are passionate about helping Requesters get great results from crowdsourcing.
To help new Requesters get started successfully with MTurk, a community of Worker customers have authored a set of guidelines. Although they are primarily written for Academic Requesters performing research using MTurk, all Requesters may find several of the topics helpful.
Here are some useful excerpts:
Maintain Worker Privacy: Don’t require Workers to provide personally identifying information to complete your HITs. This includes: email address, birth dates, real names, Facebook logins. Don’t require Workers to register on sites that require this kind of personal information to complete your HITs, or similarly require a Facebook login.
What is ethical pay for Turkers (Workers) in studies? Consider the estimated duration and difficulty of your task when deciding about payment….Many more experienced and knowledgeable Turkers (Workers) refuse to work for less than $0.15-$0.20 per minute or more.
Provide reasonable time estimates and limits Clearly state up-front a fair expectation of how long it will take for someone who’s not already familiar with it to thoroughly read and answer everything in your survey or task. Err on the side of overestimation, to avoid disappointment/frustration if it takes someone more than the estimated time, a situation which can encourage some Workers to rush through the rest of it to reduce the decline in their effective pay rate.
What if my task takes longer than I thought? If an amount you pay is expected to be a fair rate turns out not to because you accidentally underestimated how long your survey would take for reasonably-efficient Workers to complete, consider adjusting for this situation by sending bonuses to the Workers to make up the difference.
Approve work as soon as possible: Set your auto approval time as short as reasonably possible for the time you’ll need for any checking of the work; 7 days should generally be more than sufficient, and it’s better if it’s less than that. Many Requesters approve work in less than 3 days, some in less than 24 hours.
Ensure conditions for rejecting work are clear and fair: Rejections leave Workers with a mark counting against them on their ‘permanent record’ at MTurk that may take them below a qualification threshold necessary for certain other HITs.