Welcome to your Turkopticon Newsletter 

We have had a busy year so far and with your help, we can carry on trying to make turking better for us all.

To leave reviews please visit our homepage turkopticon.net.

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.

 

Our Next Open Forum

If you have thoughts on Turkopticon’s mass rejection campaign or any other issues facing turkers, we would like to invite you to our open community forum on Tuesday, December 13th. Turkers can stop by between the hours of 1-3 pm EST. As always, we will try to answer questions about the platform itself, turker tools and forums, how to get started on AMT, and more. Please fill out the registration form at the link below and we will provide the Zoom link. Camera use is optional. Feel free to come for 2 minutes or the full 2 hours. We look forward to chatting with you all next week!

Signup at https://turkopticon.net/open-forum.

If you want to learn more or have questions, please email us at volunteercoms@turkopticon.net.

 

BIAS IN DATA

How often have you done a study and thought, “they are forcing me to sound this way?” How often have you been given limited choices on a question when none align with your views? What becomes of that data? Was the study designed to give the requesters a voice on a topic they had already decided on?

 

We have all seen articles claiming Mechanical Turk gives bad data, is full of bots, or unreliable. While that isn’t entirely a lie to me, it also says a lot about the different levels of misunderstanding on how the platform and its tools can help them make their studies.

 

They have done all the research with their analysis, charts, and graphs, but did they ask questions that can only be answered to their liking? Is MTurk this flawed, or do we need to look at how studies are being set up and how humans are being verified? You can’t blame your tools when you don’t know how to fix your car, much like MTurk can’t be blamed when your study is set up poorly.

 

Many factors could affect data in research, from getting the right participants from the beginning, and building a data quality strategy, to showing these same levels of quality to your audience through proper self-evaluation and revision. Professional values are essential, and only through honesty, objectivity, respect, responsibility, integrity, and impartiality can you show strong work ethics, accountability, and quality work standard.

 

Researchers who don’t want to learn how to use their tools properly are not that distant, ethically speaking, from the participants who inattentively share their answers. Both are held responsible for the bad data they are providing or sharing and for what it might represent for coming studies and the future of honest workers and requesters whose livelihoods depend on doing this kind of research.

 

For those who are just readers of such studies, always keep in mind to think for yourself, or others will think for you.

 

 

AKA

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!