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Talking the Talk in Citizen Science

Increasingly, citizen scientists do work beyond the primary goal of the project (i.e., advanced work) such as writing articles. These activities often take place in discussion boards and have a set of linguistic norms for contributing. For newcomers, learning this language presents a challenge since there are no formal opportunities for them to learn the language and volunteers who join later need to learn more than volunteers who join earlier in a project life-cycle. In this poster, we examine how newcomers language use shifts over the course of two citizen science projects. We find that, although, newcomers joining later might face obstacles, newcomer language associated with advanced work increase over the project's life-cycle. The analysis can help the science team assess whether newcomers on the talk page have either adopted advanced terminologies or they need to have a more formal resource such as tutorial or blog posts.