“Turkopticon”- The “Must” have Mturk Tool for every Worker.

While I was working on MTurk, I came across a forum for workers, called “Turkopticon”. It is an ever growing “community” of workers who review requesters and their HITS, and weed out unethical requesters from legit ones. Not only is it just for the reviews, but we also vent to one another when we encounter problems and we help each other out. I immediately fell in love with it, and with the helpful “extension” tool that allows me to view a requesters ratings directly on the MTurk platform without having to visit the “Turkopticon” page itself, it became the ONLY tool I needed. I have saved myself from potential scammers, unethical requesters and HITS that pose problems. What I really appreciate about this forum is the integrity and honesty the forum upholds. Review are meticulously overlooked by “moderators” and other workers who are given “commenting abilities” like myself. “Turkopticon” has a decently long page of rules that every user must follow in order to post reviews, if these rules are not followed, the review is “flagged” by moderators or workers with commenting abilities and the review will not affect the overall ratings for that particular requester, and the review can also be hidden from readers. For example, a requester is rated on the following brackets: “fairness”, “pay”, “communication”, and “fast” (how quickly work is approved or rejected). There is also a comment field in which a worker briefly describes how much the HIT paid, how long it took to complete, and so on. Workers CANNOT disclose “screener” information (qualifications that are needed to gain access to the HIT). Workers cannot give all poor ratings for a requester for unjust reasons, their ratings must be honest and fair. For example, a worker cannot rate “communication” poorly if they never tried to communicate with the requester, but they can if they tried to email the requester and no response was received. Workers also have the option to flag a requester as “Violating Mechanical Turk’s Terms of Services”. Some violations include: asking a worker for personal identifiable information (full name, email address, phone number, date of birth and so on), requiring workers to create accounts on another website, requiring workers to manipulate a search engine or other website, asking workers to solicit third parties and so on.

“Turkopticon” is a great way for workers to inquire about the reputation of requesters and weed out the good work from the bad. As Mturk does not provide much “protection” for workers, “Turkopticon” has become the “must” have tool for every worker.