Hi there CrowdSurfers!
It’s time for another Friendly Tips post!
If you’ve been waiting for an email response from Crowdsurf (and you’ve checked to make sure it didn’t wind up in your spam folder), it might have been the victim of a technical issue that was resolved recently. If you’re not already aware, Crowdsurf does have a ticketing system where all of our support issues are stored. You can get to it by going to www.crowdsurfwork.com and clicking on the “Support Center” link. You might find your missing email there! And moving forward, email responses should be working again as expected.
For Transcription workers, we wanted to remind you that there is no guideline against using contractions! So if someone says “we’re,” you don’t need to transcribe it as “we are.” And unless there is a sidebar note telling you otherwise, if someone uses acceptable slang like “gonna,” it doesn’t have to be transcribed as “going to.”
When a speaker is talking quickly or the audio quality isn’t optimal, the difference between things like “help” and “helped” can be subtle. The same is true for words like “this” and “these.” Remember that we’re trying to transcribe what was spoken as accurately as possible within the guidelines. Sometimes speakers say things that are just plain grammatically incorrect, and when that happens, we should transcribe what was spoken and not correct it.
For FTR workers, we’ve noticed some issues with names recently. Google is your friend 🙂 We don’t expect you to use Google for names of graduates or situations like that. But if speaker or subject’s name ever appears on the screen during a job, it’s the FTR worker’s responsibility to make sure it is spelled correctly throughout the HIT. For legislative HITs, the names of all state elected officials are searchable. FTR workers should make sure that all of these names are spelled correctly.
Another issue to watch out for in FTR is periods that unintentionally break lines. There should be no periods after middle initials, since the system will interpret that period as the end of a sentence. Periods after titles like “Mr.” or “Dr.” won’t break the line, but these are exceptions that were specifically written into the interface.
And finally, if you’re not already part of the Crowdsurf private subreddit, please join us! You’ll find even more helpful tips from fellow workers there!