Title
Collective Intelligence in Citizen Science - A Study of Performers and Talkers.
Abstract
The recent emergence of online citizen science is illustrative of an efficient and effective means to harness the crowd in order to achieve a range of scientific discoveries. Fundamentally, citizen science projects draw upon crowds of non-expert volunteers to complete short Tasks, which can vary in domain and complexity. However, unlike most human-computational systems, participants in these systems, the `citizen scientists' are volunteers, whereby no incentives, financial or otherwise, are offered. Furthermore, encouraged by citizen science platforms such as Zooniverse, online communities have emerged, providing them with an environment to discuss, share ideas, and solve problems. In fact, it is the result of these forums that has enabled a number of scientific discoveries to be made. In this paper we explore the phenomenon of collective intelligence via the relationship between the activities of online citizen science communities and the discovery of scientific knowledge. We perform a cross-project analysis of ten Zooniverse citizen science projects and analyse the behaviour of users with regards to their Task completion activity and participation in discussion and discover collective behaviour amongst highly active users. Whilst our findings have implications for future citizen science design, we also consider the wider implications for understanding collective intelligence research in general.
Year
Venue
Field
2014
CoRR
World Wide Web,Media studies,Collective intelligence,Wisdom of the crowd,Sociology,Citizen science,Artificial intelligence,Task completion,Online discussion,Machine learning
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1406.7551
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.46
13
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ramine Tinati114218.86
Elena Simperl21069122.60
Markus Luczak-Rösch316722.68
Max Van Kleek454258.95
Nigel Shadbolt54273321.53