@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.
@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.
@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.
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”
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).
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.
@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.)
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.
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.