علم با کمک مردم

AMembers of the public have contributed to science for a long time. One of the longest-running examples is the Christmas Bird Count in the Americas, which began in 1900 as an alternative to a holiday tradition of competitive bird hunting. Instead of shooting birds, participants counted them. The count still takes place every winter, and because thousands of volunteers have repeated it for more than a century, scientists can use the records to study how bird populations have changed over long periods.

BThe internet has made it possible for far more people to take part. The Zooniverse platform, which traces its origins to 2007, invites volunteers to look at real research material, such as telescope images, old handwritten documents or photographs from wildlife cameras, and to classify what they see. No specialist training is required. Researchers use this help because people are good at recognising patterns and at noticing when something looks unusual, tasks that computers can still find difficult.

CSome scientists have questioned whether data collected by volunteers can be trusted, and projects have developed several answers to this concern. On Zooniverse, the same image is usually classified by many different people and their responses are combined, so a single mistake has little effect on the result. Long-running surveys such as the bird count follow the same basic procedures each year, which allows results from different years to be compared. Clear instructions and simple tasks also reduce the chance of error.

DVolunteer observations can even reveal changes that instruments have missed. In the Globe at Night project, people around the world compare the stars they can see with a set of reference charts. When researchers analysed these reports in a study published in the journal Science in 2023, they concluded that the night sky had been getting brighter much faster than satellite measurements suggested. One explanation is that some satellite sensors cannot fully detect the bluer light produced by many modern LED lamps.