Exploring Data Quality in Games With a Purpose

Prestopnik, Nathan; Crowston, Kevin; Wang, Jun

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/47311 Copy

Description

Title

Exploring Data Quality in Games With a Purpose

Author(s)

• Prestopnik, Nathan
• Crowston, Kevin
• Wang, Jun

Issue Date

2014-03-01

Keyword(s)

• games with a purpose
• data quality
• diegetic rewards
• citizen science
• engagement

Abstract

"A key problem for crowd-sourcing systems is motivating contributions from participants and ensuring the quality of these contributions. Games have been suggested as a motivational approach to encourage contribution, but attracting participation through game play rather than scientific interest raises concerns about the quality of the data provided, which is particularly important when the data are to be used for scientific research. To assess whether these concerns are justified, we compare the quality of data obtained from two citizen science games, one a ""gamified"" version of a species classification task and one a fantasy game that used the classification task only as a way to advance in the game play. Surprisingly, though we did observe cheating in the fantasy game, data quality (i.e., classification accuracy) from participants in the two games was not significantly different. As well, the quality of data from short-time contributors was at a usable level of accuracy. These findings suggest that various approaches to gamification can be useful for motivating contributions to citizen science projects."

Publisher

iSchools

Series/Report Name or Number

iConference 2014 Proceedings

Type of Resource

text

Language

english

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/47311

DOI

https://doi.org/10.9776/14066

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 is held by the authors of individual items in the proceedings. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

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