Am I contributing, or clogging up Eyewire's servers with garbage?

Maybe I’m a very small minority here, but I don’t care what my total daily, weekly or monthly score is. Am I improving, if the work is something other than top notch? That is the question I’d like to know. I’ve been doing this for a while now & lately, every time I think about doing a few cubes I wonder if I’m really contributing or just wasting my time. It is hard to be motivated to do any cubes.


What I wish is that for every cube I could see both how I match up with what others have previously done & the degree of confidence the AI has that what it is comparing my work with is correct or not. Do I match up with the general consensus at 90% or 20%? Also, how sure is the AI that there is an established standard? Am I only the 2nd person or the 10th person to do this cube? Did the 9 people before me all do it the same way & I’m the only one to deviate, or are there now 10 completely different views on this cube? The AI uses some basis to determine a score. I assume the data the AI has could produce some rating as to how sure the AI is that there is a consensus. If not, simply saying that my work is being compared to 1 person’s work or 9 would be helpful.

Maybe I did it perfectly & the 9 people before me who all agreed, all made the same mistake, but probably it is more likely that I could learn from knowing that I need to take a second or third look the next time I have a similar cube. Not only do I not know what I need to do to improve, there is no way to know if I’m repeating the same mistakes & doing sub par work. I might be simply wasting server time & costing Eyewire money. 

To produce a higher score, I could go back to the way I did things starting out. Clicking on something & then erased it, then deciding it might need to be included after all & clicked on it again, only to erase it again. I had no idea what I was doing & it took forever on most cubes. Evidently the AI likes that because on average I got a much higher score per cube. Now things go much faster, but am I turning in something useful or simply repeating the same mistakes & bogging down the Eyewire server for no good reason? Either I want to be excellent at this or know how to improve with feedback even indirect, or why bother if for all I know I might be bogging down the servers with nonsense. 

Hi GregO,

Thanks for letting us know your concerns. You can view your overall accuracy in your profile. It gets updated every Monday and while it doesn’t tell you how you did on individual cubes, it will give you a good idea of how your are doing overall. As far as individual cubes, if you are unsure of your work we definitely encourage taking some screen-shots and either emailing us at support, posting links in chat for fellow players to look at or posting on our ‘help what is this’ section of the forum here-
 http://forum.eyewire.org/discussion/227/help-what-is-this#Item_90

You definitely are contributing by playing, It takes a bit of time to get used to but the more cubes you do the easier it will become for you to see your own accuracy. Once again, we are all more than happy to take a look at any work you are unsure of to help you along.

Cheers,
Aleks




GregO,


You are most certainly contributing, have no worries about that. I know that others have shared your concerns before. I hear that the devs are working on ways to be able to see better your accuracy and how to improve, but for now the accuracy in your profile and the points you receive are useful tools (though the latter can be sometimes hard to judge). If you are stuck/confused I would recommend asking in the chat - there are many people willing to help. 

As for your concerns about the overall accuracy of a cube, there are expert players (scouts, scythes & admin) who work hard checking cubes to make sure they are correct. Yes, they are only people, but experts nonetheless. They will be more than happy to help you in chat. 

Since we are discovering neurons no-one has seen before, every opinion is valuable. 

Trace on!

addieye
Scythe & Moderator

Thanks so much for telling me about the accuracy rating in my profile! I had no idea that any accuracy rate existed. Once knowing a profile existed I still had to google EyeWire profile to find where to look. More than once a week would be even better, but once a week is of great help. There are a great many ways everyone has to contribute & everyone has to consider where they can best serve. I would hate to have terrible accuracy with no idea how to improve, simply be wasting my time & clogging up the EyeWire servers with nonsense. I was surprised to see a rating of 95%. Next week I’ll have to see if I can do better. 


By accident my mouse curser rolled over the accuracy rating & the percentage of times I under color & over color popped up.I had it in my head that most of my mistakes was probably under coloring, but I only had under colored 0.8%. My problem is that I am over coloring. Now that I know that, I’ll have to far more careful & check my work for over coloring before I turn it in. 

Thanks again to both of you for telling me about the accuracy rating. I’ll be checking it every Monday. I’ll be looking forward to seeing what the devs come up with in letting us better see what our accuracy is.

Hi GregO, 


Glad we could help! Great job on the 95% accuracy! Until we can put out more ways to see how your are doing, I hope the accuracy profile can give you what you need to continue your tracing confidently! 

Like I mentioned, we are all happy to help if you have any trouble with cubes or any general questions.

Cheers, 
Aleks