Notes From Nature Talk

Increasing collaboration for accuracy and efficiency

  • muscicapa by muscicapa

    I have taken part in another crowd-sourced transcription project (or perhaps an experiment at the Natural History Museum ) that made use of Wikisource and as a participant, it was extremely easy to work on it; it was easy to fill in what I could and leave things blank where I could not and someone else could try and improve after me and I would know what corrections were made, discuss with the people working along with me and so on. I find the page transcription of the ornithological log on this site extremely laborious and easily improvable by changes in the underlying software system. If the scanned image were available to me beside a blank Excel sheet, I could have made use of copy-paste and run down the columns and finished off the digitization in about 5 minutes a page (I just tried it out and this varies with the number of ditto marks found on the page, the more there are the shorter the work should be). It takes me upwards of 30 minutes using this form that tries to impose an order on the participants and when I try to fill in the fields in an order of my own choice - for instance entering the scientific names of all the rows first, I find that the registration fields get messed up. This project could really be improved with some inputs on usability from participants if not from UX experts.

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