Your ideas to get more people engaged

@robertb Fantastic job with the EyeWire page on Wikipedia. I’m impressed by how well you wrote that. It’s so good that I don’t think we should worry about making edits or adding material for the time being. We have a lot of other stuff to do. 


Would you be interested in writing more content for EyeWire? @balkamm has created wiki.eyewire.org.  Please take a look. We haven’t linked it to the main site yet, as it’s going to take some further development to get login working with a single username.  For now we are editing anonymously.  @jinseop is leading some MIT students to write articles on various types of retinal neurons. I’m thinking that we might move the Neurons, Retina, Challenge, and Instructions pages to the wiki also.

@joseerre Hilarious, but doesn’t the Enterprise have two engines, one on either side? I dimly recall seeing other Federation space ships with a single engine. Can any Trekkies out there confirm and/or find an image?

@hsseung Thanks! I’m not sure I’m qualified enough to write for the wiki, since it will have much more technical breadth than I am familiar with. But I will certainly attempt to contribute, if only to pull information from around the web and add it as a starting point.


Also, the Latin version is up. Thrill to ancient words describing 21st century concepts! Gasp as Sebastian’s name becomes Sebastianus! :slight_smile: Galen would be so proud.

@robertb I’m confident that you’ll be able to contribute to the wiki, by working with others who can point to the appropriate literature.


Friends, Romans, countrymen — join the EyeWire community!


One thing – you really, really want to prevent anonymous edit access to the wiki. Quickly. Believe me, I’ve had wikis before, and if you allow anonymous editing privileges, you’ll end up having to delete articles on “Earn at Home” and images for “Smokeless Cigarettes” :frowning:

@robertb,

You can start contributing on the instructions page of the wiki. It won’t require any technical background, you can just share your experience on playing EyeWire. 

How about an “Achievements” structure?  Most online games have various “badges” users can earn.

Usually the badges have in-theme fun or punny names.

Example goals:
10 tasks solved
100 tasks solved
high accuracy award


Oh good, my EyeWire submission to BoingBoing was accepted. Prepare for the deluge (and some snarking).

Yeah, @robertb. We figured that this morning. I thought it must be you. Many thanks!

Hi @monkeywidget, that’s exactly what I have had in mind. I’m going to push that idea for you. :wink:

Whoa lots of tweeting of the BoingBoing story. Unlike @jinseop, I didn’t realize @robertb posted that!!!

What about an affiliation with the Zooniverse projects? That is where I usually sign up for citizen science projects and they have a huge number of volunteers.

Actually a Zooniverse affiliation would be worth exploring; their projects are not just astronomy related and have branched out into things like mapping weather in the past from ships logs.


You could ask the current members to write a description of how they found out about the project.  I subscribe to Neuroscience Information Network on Facebook, they posted a link to the Connectomics debate on Youtube.  I watched the video and heard about this site during the introductions.  Another thought would be to contact Salman Khan of Khan Academy and see if he could do a video about the site.  He also knows or has access to individuals who are familiar with the achievement structure mentioned previously by Monkeywidget. 

There’s my .02

@krittenhouse That’s a great idea. We should definitely contact the Khan Academy.  I’m also tempted to crowdsource all of part of a video to EyeWire members.

@smalljude With what other citizen science projects are you involved? (I’m curious.)

@backupelk I agree that we should contact Zooniverse. I’ll get on it.

I’ve dabbled in a quite a lot of them on Zooniverse - Planethunters, Icehunters (retired project now), classifying galaxies in Galaxy Zoo, Solar Stormwatch, old Weather (WWI ships logs) and a couple more. I have to say I’m so engrossed in Eyewire that I haven’t been back to Zooniverse for a while! It’s a great site though - a nice place to centralize citizen science.  The one project that really beat me was protein folding on Foldit.  I just couldn’t grasp it once I was trying specific ‘puzzles’ after the tutorials. :frowning:

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One of the major advantages of being in Zooniverse is picking up the 'what's this?' players. Its simple enough to be a few minutes time waster, while producing usable results. The more complex the project (such as FoldIT), the more people it will loose because of the steep learning curve.

One of the problems with FoldIT is that you have to develop a 'sense' of how proteins fit together, unfortunately its something that seems to take a while. Most of the top level folding is done using LUA scripts with hand folding taking less precedence. I'm not that good at it. On a former account, in which I played in a team, I had a top 20 global rank - my current account (solo) is #114
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Well you can approach CCP-games… They put tremendous work into building meaningful and self-motivated communities. They run EVE-online and lots of people who play it have both science interest and spare time to do something else.

From my ingame experience it is crucial to have voice coms like TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrillo. People feel that they are around, they can chit-chat and of course they can all the time ask for help someone who is online. Simply it builds ingame culture.