Newsletter 14

Our October 2021 newsletter. You can see our previous newsletters on our blog here.

We are are now using www.turkopticon.net as our homepage.

Have you been affected by a mass rejection? We’d love to hear your story. Please contact us.

See the bottom of the newsletter for how you can submit short articles.

You Are Invited!

It is that time again, and our next open community forum is rapidly approaching! Please feel free to join us at any time during the forum during the hours of 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST on Thursday, October 28th. We are having such great conversations with people and hearing fantastic ideas.

Follow this link to register and we hope to see you there: blog.turkopticon.net/?page_id=1751

We are excited to “see” you on the 28th!

Updating Reviews

Recently, a requester reached out to Turkopticon about having contact information removed from a review. This led to a discussion about what is okay to be included in reviews. Our rules state, “Don’t include personal information about the requester unless the information was included in the HIT. Business information, including the requester’s name, business email address, and business address, can be included. The requester’s personal email, street address, phone number, or social network profiles should generally not be included.”  This information can also be found at turkopticon.net/rules. We just want you, the reviewers, to know that Turkopticon is your voice against requesters and that we’re always here to protect you.

Another issue brought to our attention by a user is reviews that are not getting updated when rejections are overturned. It’s important for us to keep updated reviews for requesters, so workers have accurate information when checking what work to complete or not. We know that coming back to update reviews takes time, and time is money, but we rely on reviews being accurate to perform our work. So, if you leave a rejection review, and it’s overturned, please come back and update, so we all can have a better picture of what requesters are trying to be better and which ones continue to abuse the platform and workers! Fairer reviews get us fairer requesters.

Welcome to Grad Student Season! 

If you have noticed an increase in available HITs lately, you aren’t alone!  With fall semesters in full swing across the world of academia, grad students are beginning to use Mturk for their research, and some of them for the first time.

Here are some tips on working with these new academic requesters:

• Have a look at worker reviews if there are any.  This can sometimes ease that “new requester” anxiety.
• Everyone makes mistakes.  If you see a glaring error in a requester’s HIT, a polite approach is appreciated. Many requesters receive little to no training on how to use Mturk.
• If you have questions on a HIT, reach out to the requester. Obtaining clarification will reduce your risk of rejection and increase the quality of the data in the study. If we want requesters to continue to provide work, we need to give good quality data.
• Sometimes a requester rejects and they either didn’t mean to do it or didn’t understand what a rejection would mean for the worker.  If this is the case, asking for a reversal and providing them with a link to instructions on how to reverse it can be quite helpful. (We need to remember there are legit reasons for rejections, however.)

The reversal instructions can be found here:  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSMechTurk/latest/RequesterUI/ReversingRejectedAssignment.html

We hope this makes navigating “grad student season” a little easier!

Do You Use Speech Recognition Software?

If so, we would love to speak with you!  There are so many options available and not all are Mturk friendly.  Turkopticon is working to compile a list of programs to help aid workers who may benefit from using speech recognition software to complete work.

This idea was born in one of our recent open community forums. We sincerely thank the turker/s who brought forth the topic, shared their personal experiences, and those who have been available to work on this effort!

Please consider sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to these programs and software.  You can email moderation@turkopticon.net  or message us on Facebook/Twitter.

Turkopticon is looking for suggestions!

Do you have suggestions for how to make Turkopticon better and would like to share them with us?

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!