Hey all,

I wanted to followup from the Zooniverse comments/thread a couple months back, as part of Pharos's comments about crowd-sourcing depicts statements ( https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2017-June/010795.html). I met with Zooniverse staff during the week leading up to Wikimania, and was able to get a rough outline of how they might be connected with our ecosystem:

- They have a project builder system, that allows anyone to create a project that uses their crowdsourcing structures, to do description and identification of components of media files. The documentation is at: https://www.zooniverse.org/lab - They have an undocumented method for drawing media from external repositories via a simple API -- so we could be calling on content generated from sets via Commons or Wikidata. - They would be interested in exploring if there is a good process for connecting Commons as a source for their project builder, and would be willing to provide some developer advisory support for either a volunteer or partner institution to develop an appropriate link between the two apis. I am talking with Pharos about potentially doing something with the Met set on Commons, but if you think you have a set of media files already on Commons that might be of interest to a citizen science-type crowdsourcing project - please let me know. (Tools developed by the Wikidata community might be more appropriate in the short term for the Met collection [1]) - Cool-less relevant note: Zooniverse is experimenting with using Machine learning models to both prompt citizen science actions, and to sort various sets of media in projects.

I am interested in exploring this relationship, because as Structured Data on Commons gains the ability to store structured media file information in the next few years, we have an increased ability to absorb simple descriptive and other crowdsourcing on top of media files, and the Zooniverse community provides access to a very wide group of crowd-contribution interested communities. Moreover, if one of the value statements for uploading to Commons, was a simple access point to Zooniverse Crowdsourcing for either scientific purposes or enriching structured descriptive metadata, we might have a lot more contributions of both scientific and cultural heritage collections to Commons.[2]

If you have a set of media on Commons that you might be interested in testing in the Zooniverse Project Builder, and have some developer capacity, please let me know offlist. We don't need to move quickly on the offer of consultation, but I would like to continue talking with Zooniverse about how to create a better relationship.

Cheers,

Alex