Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-29 11:30 AM – 11:40 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-05
Abstract
The Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle of Paris (MNHN) completed a massive digitization program of the herbarium specimens (P, PC) , nearly 6 millions of images were put online between 2008 and 2012. Most of the associated database records contain only a minimum set of attribute (scientific name, catalog number and continent of origin). As many more information is most often available on the photographed labels, the MNHN launched in 2012 a citizen science website http://lesherbonautes.mnhn.fr/ to enrich the database with a transcription done by general public.
To encourage participation, small subsets of the herbarium with a common theme called “missions” (a taxonomic group, a famous botanist, a specific region, etc.) are presented to the public with a target number of contributions expected. The site includes social aspects to incite participants, named herbonauts, to compare their ranking and discuss missions and specimens.
Quality of contributions is ensured, by redundancy mechanisms in the data entry, and simultaneously training the participants through “quiz” of growing complexity and expanding their abilities. Evaluating crowd contributions quality shows it compares well with institutional key in.
Despite a minimal communication, the site is receiving an average of 35000 contributions per month. Most of them are brought either by occasional visitor doing a single anonymous contribution or by a small group of passionate users answering thousands of questions.