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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

What accuracy do you think humans have?

If I give you 1000 handwritten numbers, do you think you'll make less than 10 mistakes?

The forms are in open access, anyone can fill one form, so they surely did consider variations in accuracy (if not plain sabotage). They are probably submitting the same data to multiple people and the cross-checking the submissions. Also, the totals help to filter out submissions with mistakes. One can also add bound checking for individual values (misplaced decimal point, extra digits etc.). I would love to see how they do it, but they'll probably keep it confidential because trolls and other vandals.

This is exactly how zooniverse works. The first thing you do is go through a few known pieces of data to verify you know how to identify things correctly (more important for galaxy types, etc).

As you start labeling data everything has to reach a consensus. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it does have multiple people verify each piece of data.

Run both OCR and human in parallel and double check anomalies

I would expect humans to make similar errors.

AIUI the classic procedure for tasks like this is/was:

Hide some graduate students. Tell each to transcribe, and to mark the difficult spots. Give each page to two students. Next, have someone else process the page pairs and resolve conflicts and the marked trouble spots.

As long as one of the students notices that a particular spot is difficult to read, the error is discovered and can be handled by someone who isn't numb from transcribing pages of simple numbers.

They will likely assign the same tasks to multiple people and use an ensemble of human consensus.

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