Data validation in citizen science: a case study from Project FeederWatch
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Full frame distilled prediction
Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
- Candidate categories
- Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
- Consensus categories
- none
- Domain
- Candidate signal: noneConsensus signal: none
- Study design
- Candidate signal: Not applicableConsensus signal: none
- Genre
- Candidate signal: ReviewConsensus signal: Review
- Teacher disagreement score
- 0.940
- Threshold uncertainty score
- 0.998
- Validation status
machine_predicted_unvalidated·codex-gemma-dda1882f352a
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.238 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
To become more widely accepted as a valuable research tool, citizen‐science projects must find ways to ensure that data gathered by large numbers of people with varying levels of expertise are of consistently high quality. Here, we describe a data validation protocol developed for Project FeederWatch, a continent‐wide bird monitoring program, that is designed to increase researchers' and participants' confidence in the data being collected.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment
- Topic
- Species Distribution and Climate Change
- Field
- Environmental Science
- Canadian institutions
- not available
- Funders
- Cornell Lab of OrnithologyBird Studies Canada
- Keywords
- Citizen scienceProtocol (science)Data scienceData qualityComputer scienceData collectionQuality (philosophy)Open scienceEngineeringSociologyOperations managementStatisticsMedicineSocial science
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes