Cute Baby Elephant
I hope you’ve been having fun with the new Season 5 images. I have. It’s been about a week since we went live with Season 5, and we’re making good progress. It took under two weeks to go through the first three seasons in December. (We had some media attention then and lots of people checking out the site.) It took about three weeks to finish Season 4 in January. According to my super science-y image copy-and-paste method, it may take us about two months to do Season 5:
And that’s fine. But I was curious about who’s working on Season 5. The Talk discussion boards are particularly quiet, with almost no newbie questions. So is everyone working on Season 5 a returnee? Or do we have new folks on board?
I looked at the user data from a data dump done on Sunday. So it includes the first 5 or so days of Season 5. In total, there are 2,000 volunteers who had contributed to 280,000 classifications by Sunday! I was actually quite amazed to see that 6% of the classifications are being done by folks not logged in. Is that because they’re new people trying out the site — or because there are some folks who like to classify without logging in? I can’t tell.
But I can compare Season 5 to Season 4. We had 8,300 logged-in volunteers working on Season 4. Of all the classifications, 9% were done by not-logged-in folks. That suggests we have fewer newcomers so far for Season 5. But then we get to an intriguing statistic: of those 2,000 volunteers working on Season 5 in its first five days, 33% of them did not work on Season 4 at all! And those 33% apparently new folks have contributed 50% of the (logged-in) classifications!
So what’s going on? Maybe we’re getting these new volunteers from other Zooniverse projects that have launched since January. Maybe they’re finding us in other ways. (Have you seen that the site can be displayed in Finnish in addition to Polish now?) But in any case, welcome everyone and I hope you spot your favorite animal.
Me, I found this super cute baby elephant just the other day:
Snapshot Serengeti 
I’m one of the newbies. I learned about Zooniverse few weeks ago from a news article which mentioned the Notes from Nature project. From there I have explored a few of the other Zooniverse projects, and I was disappointed that Season 4 was finished by the time I got here. Only a week or so later, I got the email about Season 5, and now I’m totally hooked!
Some of my favourite pictures haven’t even had animals in them. Such beautiful landscapes! My first ostrich was a total thrill. I am really hoping to come across a baby big cat.
Thanks for letting us be a part of your work!
Glad you’re enjoying Snapshot and thanks for checking us out!
I’m a returnee! Noticed its been quieter than before too. Oh well, might just mean it lasts longer for us to look through 🙂
I just got told “We’re through the entire data”. Given this blog post I’m assuming there is a SW problem. I’ve pointed Arfon to this.
Hi Ipspieler, I’m not getting the message right now. If you’re still getting the “we’re all done” message, try pressing “refresh” on your browser to see if that helps.
Had a conversation with Arfon. Deleting cookies wasn’t enough. I had to delete the entire history concerning the site. Then it worked again.
I’m also a newby. I came across with the zooniverse projects because of an article in a german newspaper. First I worked on the space projects, but then your season 5 went on. Now I am checking your side every day from time to time. It’s just fantastic to see all those pictures. On my first day I saw a wonderful lion. That was so fantastic! And now i am curious what other great picture I will see. So, thanks for this great project! Greetings from Germany
Welcome, and I’m glad you’re enjoying the project. 🙂
I’m an enthusiastic returnee. ❤ ❤ ❤ the baby elephant! Also the tree full of weaverbirds I found this evening…
There are some pictures where there aren’t nothing. What can I do in that cases?
I’m a returnee. I’ve worked on all 5 seasons. Love it. Season 5 includes the “nothing there” photos. Good. I get to see more scenery and we all have more time to classify them than you all have. leave them in!