A local community on a global collective intelligence platform: A case study of individual preferences and collective bias in ecological citizen science.

ABSTRACT: The collective intelligence of crowds could potentially be harnessed to address global challenges, such as biodiversity loss and species' extinction. For wisdom to emerge from the crowd, certain conditions are required. Importantly, the crowd should be diverse and people's contributions should be independent of one another. Here we investigate a global citizen-science platform-iNaturalist-on which citizens report on wildlife observations, collectively producing maps of species' spatiotemporal distribution. The organization of global platforms such as iNaturalist around local projects compromises the assumption of diversity and independence, and thus raises concerns regarding the quality of such collectively-generated data. We spent four years closely immersing ourselves in a local communit

SUBMITTER: Arazy O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11346665 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature