During our last advent calendar we celebrated that our community had reached a total of 350,000 people. It’s been an incredible year. Several new projects, lots of fun and many scientific papers later – we expect to reach half a million Zooniverse users in the next day or so. Regardless of exactly when it happens, we want to say thank you to all of you ‘zooites’ out there for continuing to make our projects a big success.
Your feedback, dedication and clicks have really been paying off this year. We’ve seen multiple projects publish their first science results and there are many more on the way in 2012. Next year we expect to launch even more great projects that will allow citizen scientists to assist researchers in even more fields of work, across the world. Watch this space!
In the meantime – what exactly do 500,000 people look like? Wolfram Alpha reports that it’s the number of people who attended Woodstock in 1969. It also says that our community weigh roughly 35,000 metric tons, which is two-thirds the mass of the Titanic. The Zooniverse community generate 35 MW of power when considered as human batteries: that’s enough to supply 10,000 homes! Laid end-to-end 500,000 people stretch roughly 500 miles (~800 km) – which is of course how far the Proclaimers wold have walked.
500,000 people could fill Wembley Stadium 5 times over. Standing side-by-side they could fill the vatican, and there are only 9 armies in the world larger than the Zooniverse (China, USA, India, North Korea, Russia, South Korea, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey). We overtake turkey at 510,000 people – it won’t be long.
UPDATE:
We You did it – our 500,000th citizen scientist was ‘OHMfighter’! Here’s to the next half million! We also wanted to point everyone to their ‘My Project’ pages on the Zooniverse home page, where you can see your classification counts for all our projects. Visit http://zooniverse.org/projects/current to see your stats.
Zooniverse 
I have a comment about how the ZOO projects run. It’s something that I don’t think has occurred to you. if you will go through the comments that are on each Project you will find many complaints about NO FEEDBACK, NO ONE HERE, etc, etc.
YOUR SOURCE FOR THESE BLOGS comes from the zoo projects. And each project has a discussion, comment and chat function. YET **YOU** never participate in them. The users of these projects, the common people that participate and do the work EXPECT discussion but never get it.
I don’t think **YOU** get it.
My proof is that after 8 days (yes I know it is the Christmas season) is that Mine is the first and so far the ONLY comment to this announcement. You mention:
“Your feedback, dedication and clicks have really been paying off this year. We’ve seen multiple projects publish their first science results and there are many more on the way in 2012.”
Yet IN THE SCIENCE LAB (the Zoo Projects) nothing is published or commented BY YOU. come on guys. You need informed participants not button clicking slaves. More interaction.
WE THE PEOPLE that provide your data feel left out. Keep it up, you know what the eventual result will be.
Hi
Thanks for the comment – I think what you’re actually showing here is that people don’t comment on the blogs. We are trying to build tools that have the science teams more involved int he forums, but things aren’t quick – writing a paper can easily take a year and a little patience is sometimes needed.
In the last few months we’ve done PH live chats, worked on improving talk for science teams, and published more results than ever before which credited users. There is always room for improvement, but I think we’re doing ok…
Chris