Penguin Watch Talk

Hashtags

  • zoogirl1 by zoogirl1

    I am new to this site but not zooniverse. Over at my other project, they request using hashtags to identify the species we see in the video. I have only just begun so not many but I have been doing this here as well. Is that not what you do here?

    Posted

  • yshish by yshish moderator, translator in response to zoogirl1's comment.

    Hello @zoogirl1 , welcome on PW 😃

    That's a good question. Well, each project is different and each has its our needs. We don't need to identify penguin species here, nor in the classification. The researchers of PW don't work with the hashtags anyhow. They are not helpful for their results. They only work with the marks in pictures. Unlike some other projects, like Chimp&See, where the hashtags are critical and the researchers want their volunteers to hashtag everything. And then they compare the hashtags with the marks from classification, or make tag-group collections etc. But usually, there are rules how to use the hashtags everywhere.

    But one purpose of the hashtags is the same for all Zooniverse projects - and it is the main purpose. They are meant for the Search function. So when you for example want to see how a Chinstrap chick looks like, you type "Chinstrap" and "Chick" on the Search page, and it should give you the results you're looking for, based on the hashtags used in comments. Or you can just click on a hashtag anywhere on the Talk and it will show you other posts tagged the same way.

    So why don't we want you to hashtag anything when it is good for the Search?

    There is no need for new examples of chicks and adults and eggs and penguin species any more as there are so many of them already, from the first year of the project. If we let our volunteers keep using hashtags, the Talk would become flooded by unnecessary posts and the ones with questions and interesting catches worth our attention could get overlooked. There are a few thousands of classifications made every single day. Can you imagine, how the Talk would look like? 😃 We would have to spend too much time going through the recent posts to find the questions. And you, volunteers, would spend your time by hashtaging convinced that you're doing something useful but it would just take your time from the classification or from reading interesting discussions on the Talk. Also, the Search would have too many results, and it would show both good pictures of what is hashtagged and bad ones. You would have to go through too many pages of results before you would find some good examples of what you're looking for.

    Still, there are a few things we are interested in, as well as the researchers. When you find something really interesting, extraordinary, or just too beautiful, please, let us know and we can give it a proper keyword 😃 Of course, you can use Dailyzoo tag for anything you feel that deserves it. We made a chapter in our FAQs about using hashtags. There should be a link to their list.

    Also, we would like to avoid having nonsense tags in the discussion. We have many children among our volunteers and some tend to misunderstand the purpose of hashtags and put the # symbol in front of every word in their posts.

    Hope this makes sense to you 😃

    Thanks for your help on the project.

    Cheers,
    Zuzi

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  • zoogirl1 by zoogirl1

    So really you just want the counts of the animals. Comments or discussion is for unusual or special but otherwise don't.

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  • gardenmaeve by gardenmaeve moderator

    Hi- As Zuzi says in her excellent post, comments and discussion can be about anything you find interesting or when you have a question. It's hashtags and comments that don't add to understanding of penguins and the Antarctic region we need to avoid. 😃 We hope you enjoy Penguin Watch, and thank you for wanting to learn more.

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  • yshish by yshish moderator, translator in response to zoogirl1's comment.

    You can talk about whatever you find interesting or fun in the images, just don't use the hashtags please. There is for example no need to tell every single time that the image you classified is dark or blurred or that there are more penguins that you marked etc. There are buttons for that in the classification. The researchers won't read the comments anyway and won't include them in the results. They work with the marks from the classification only.

    But if you want to ask why the picture is blurry, dark or how is it beneficial to classify dark images, it is perfectly OK to comment on them and we will do our best to reply. And if you find something interesting that would be worth the attention of the researchers, please, comment on it and we will notify them.

    Anyway, there is no need of using hashtags. Does it make more sense now? We don't want to discourage anyone from commenting. We like all the fun comments from our volunteers. We just want to make clear that there is no need for hashtags as in some other projects.

    Posted