Galaxy Zoo Starburst Talk

Suggestions on how to improve Talk ...

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    ... to make it more like the tool Carol Christian, Chris Lintott, Arfon Smith, Lucy Fortson, and Steven Bamford envisioned*. Not specific to Quench, but for the next astronomy Zooniverse project with similar aims:

    • a text-string search capability that is up to contemporary standards (Talk's search is woefully inadequate)
    • easy-to-use identifiers for individual posts within a thread (so you can point/link to an individual post not just a whole thread)
    • a stickied section/thread - under Science -> General perhaps - with short summaries of how the data were obtained (telescope, filters, pipeline, etc), what the plate scale is, size of the PSF, etc. As most of this is already available in external sites, the summaries would likely contain lots of links
    • similar stickied section/thread on how to navigate a big Collection, how to find all objects with the hashtag X, how to get a list of hashtags, etc
    • a similar stickied thread/whatever on artifacts and how they are produced/arise
    • a 'cone search' tool: input an (RA, Dec) and a radius, and you'll get all the images, Collections, posts, etc which fall within the circle (some variant of this is standard in many external, online astronomy databases, e.g. NED).

    And one that's not directly related to Talk:

    • if/when control (simulated) features are added to images, a means to identify them as such (post-classification); and preferably to be able to select (in or out)

    *"Citizen Science: Contributions to Astronomy Research", arXiv:1202.2577:

    In addition to the main site, tools which encourage communication between the volunteers and the project scientists and developers are of vital importance in attracting and sustaining a community. Much of the serendipitous science from Galaxy Zoo came from a basic forum, and a new ‘Talk’ tool that can be more closely integrated with the process of classification itself has been developed and released21. The ultimate goal of such tools should be to bring questions and interesting discoveries to the scientists’ attention only when expert input is necessary, reducing the time needed for appropriate mentoring while still ensuring nothing gets lost.

    21 https://github.com/zooniverse/Talk

    Posted

  • mlpeck by mlpeck

    MathJax support would be cool.

    Posted