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We apologize for our website being down over the weekend. The server which hosts Turkopticon ran maintenance checks and our service was disrupted. We know a lot of you count on Turkopticon and we apologize for the disruption! We’re working to ensure this will not be a problem in the future.
Have you been affected by a mass rejection? We’d love to hear your story. Please Contact us here. See the bottom of the newsletter for how you can submit short articles. |
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Inviting All Turkers to our 2nd Open Forum! |
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Have you ever wondered who your coworkers are, or have you just wanted to chat with someone who understands Mturk? Turkopticon is excited to host our 2nd turker-community open forum where we can come together to meet other turkers and talk about the issues we are having with Mturk.
Join us on Zoom on Thursday, June 17th (link to be provided) anytime between 11:00 am EST and 3:00 pm EST. Feel free to stay for a few minutes or a few hours! This will be a safe place for turkers to come together and offer suggestions to the issues we face. Camera use is not required although you may use yours if you would like.
Register here. |
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SURVEYS WITHOUT A CODE |
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This may be old news for some of us turkers, but we have to keep in mind Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is a digital labor platform with new workers being approved and included every day, thus it isn’t bad to share some of the knowledge we’ve had after working here for so many years. Lately, I’ve been noticing there is an increase of surveys that when finished, don’t supply any type of code you can put on AMT, to let the researcher or requester know you have completed the task and to be compensated for your time and work. Clearly, it makes us workers feel frustrated and that we lost our time, and even return the HITs out of fear of being rejected without a valid reason, report it for not having a code, or even blocking requesters for their lack of attention they put into their own surveys. Obviously I can’t assure it is going to work 100% of the time, but if you enter your Mturk ID number in the survey code field or enter the survey message you received at the end and submit, oftentimes a follow email explaining your situation will clear a lot of these up. And if there is a requester reading this, you could display some fixed code if respondents comply with your quality check criteria and if not you could display something like “Sorry you did not complete this survey sufficiently carefully” don’t just assume that not putting a code means workers would understand they didn’t pass your quality check. I can’t assure you the reasons behind this, but most of the time it’s just an oversight on the requester’s side, after all, they’re humans and make mistakes too. – AK
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Do You Have Grant Writing Experience? |
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Turkoption is looking for individuals with grant writing experience. As part of our effort to fund servers, forum moderation, communications, organizing, and training we are applying for grants and are looking for people to help us with the process. If you have grant writing experience and would like to volunteer to help please email us at volunteercoms@turkopticon.net
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Turkopticon is looking for suggestions! |
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Do you have suggestions for how to make Turkopticon better and want to share them, please email volunteercoms@turkopticon.net and someone will be in contact to further hear about your suggestions and see how we all can work together to make Turk better for all of us. Even if you think your ideas are ones we should know please don’t be afraid to send them our way because we listen to all suggestions and want everyone to be heard! |