Collective Intelligence in Citizen Science - A Study of Performers and Talkers

Online citizen science [Silvertown 2009] can be seen as a form of collective intelligence Lévy [1997] and Woolley et al. [2010] in which the wisdom of the crowd is applied to the Web to advance scientific knowledge [Prestopnik and Crowston 2012] Thus far, online citizen science projects [Bonney et al. 2009; Gray et al. 2012] have applied millions of volunteers to solving problems in a wide array of scientific domains, ranging from the classification of galaxies [Fortson et al. 2011] to the completion of protein folding networks [Khatib et al. 2011]. Central to many of these projects are online messaging or discussion facilities designed to allow volunteers to ask one another questions and advice. Such facilities have in many cases yielded substantial, dedicated self-sustaining online communities. In this paper, we examine participation in such communities; specifically, whether participation in online discussion influences task completion within and across 10 distinct projects of a shared citizen science platform, the Zooniverse1. Our study was conducted on a dataset from December 2009 to July 2013, in which 250, 000 users contributed over 50 million tasks and 650, 000 discussion posts.