Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
More than 6,500 volunteers have supported the accurate identification of approximately 1,000 prehistoric burial mounds in the Netherlands in just four months, proving the value of involving volunteers in archaeology.
In 2018, the Heritage Quest project was launched to harness the power of citizen scientists, utilizing crowd-sourcing to identify archaeological features on lidar imagery of the central Netherlands.
Through the involvement of thousands of people online, prehistoric burial mounds were identified across the region in a short amount of time. However, the accuracy of crowd-sourced data has been questioned in the past, as the majority of volunteers are not professional archaeologists.
"While the volume of data exceeded our expectations, we faced a key challenge common to large citizen science projects: how reliable are the detections made by volunteers?" states lead author of the research, Dr. Quentin Bourgeois from Leiden University.
To assess the accuracy of the data, the authors performed a ground-based survey of 380 sites identified during the study, examining them in person to determine whether they were in fact prehistoric barrows. Their results are published in the journal Antiquity.
According to Dr. Bourgeois, the results are clear. "Citizen science works. We found a direct correlation between the number of volunteers identifying a potential archaeological object and its likelihood of being a prehistoric burial mound."
This means that the Heritage Quest project has discovered 1,000 previously-unknown burial mounds, doubling the number of known mounds from the region in just four months.
Importantly, this shows the value of involving volunteers in archaeological projects, allowing for the identification of archaeological features much more quickly than could be achieved by professionals alone.
[...] "But for me the most amazing outcome is seeing the passion the volunteers had for our research. They have now become vocal advocates for the preserved traces of prehistoric landscapes in their region."
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Username on Friday October 18, @02:29PM
Are they finally doing away with only allowing certain people with la-de-da degree and the proper social circles to make discoveries?
Pretty hard to say you were the first when the truth is a search away in the internet age. Academia would need the cooperation of the large tech companies to enforce its gatekeeping.
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Friday October 18, @03:12PM (1 child)
https://p8.itc.cn/q_70/images01/20210801/e52360e851c0420e832044b78f618b9c.png [p8.itc.cn]
This part of the story REALLY creeped me out as a kid!
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday October 19, @12:40AM
It depends, if some watery tart throws a sword at you you should definitely use it to wield supreme executive power.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18, @04:17PM (1 child)
It appears that "Arthur T Knackerbracket" is a bot submitter that now *OWNS* Soylent News...
(Score: 4, Touché) by janrinok on Friday October 18, @06:15PM
I'm not sure why you say that. If we haven't got enough variety in different topics for the weekend I have to run the bot. Of course, if you submitted a few stories, then that would mean that the bot wouldn't have to go looking for them.
Priority over bot submissions is always given to community submissions providing that there is also the variety. If everyone is taking the easiest topics (Musk, upcoming elections, etc) then we still need to have sufficient stories in other topics. But community submissions are always looked at first.
Providing submissions does not equate to ownership. The Bot does not get karma or mod points. It has the access it needs to be able to process stories and present them for submission. Of the 556 stories that it found today less than 100 were of any real value and the good ones still have to be chosen by a human (usually me) before they get added to the submission queue. There are at least 2 other community members who also use a copy of Arthur (the bot) from time to time. The bot can search multiple RSS feeds and automatically extract a story from pages of HTML, but it cannot tell a good story from a bad one. Some say the same about me, but if that is what is bothering you then the solution is in your hands.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.