Hello - I'm new to this forum and brand new to Mechanical Turk. I was very interested in the program as I have my first baby on the way and saw this as a good opportunity to get some amazon credits. Imagine my surprise when I received the following email after registering: Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk, We have completed our review of your Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker Account. We regret to inform you that you will not be permitted to work on Mechanical Turk. Thank you for your interest in Mechanical Turk. Sincerely, Amazon Mechanical Turk https://www.mturk.com 410 Terry Avenue North SEATTLE, WA 98109-5210 USA I am completely confused! There email is a "no response" one, and I cannot find a telephone number for support. The only reason I can think of is because I live in Canada. I did research Mechanical Turk before hand and was led to believe that if I only accepted payment in amazon credit, that I would be allowed to participate. Is there any help for Canadians who wish to work with this program? Thanks in advance! Sheri
Yes. It IS because you're from Canada. Amazon is not allowing users outside of US to join mTurk right now.
Well, that sure is disappointing! Considering your location, there was probably a time when Mechanical Turk allowed non-US participants, but that time has now passed. It would be interesting to know why they made the policy change - I'm sure it's disappointed a few people. Something I might try is just using a US shipping address, as I live very close to the border. There's actually a number of businesses that offer that service to Canadians - if I resubmit with my mailing address to the US, it might produce a different result? Somehow I doubt it, but it's worth a try! Thanks for your help, Sheri
Plus you're probably using a Canadian ISP, and it's certainly easy enough for them to check your IP address...
Yes - why on earth don't they just say so in the email - "sorry we can't accept you because we are only accepting registrations from the US at present". Probably would be easy enough for them to change the template on the email which is probably just an auto response possibly with a manual check to make sure the respondent is outside the US. Like - they aren't doing anything wrong, just a change of policy, why not give the explanation in the email so the reader understands. Must be a lot of very confused recipients of that email, I was until I saw this forum post . BTW I'm from Scotland, just wondered about the possibilities for transcribing videos - though the mturk rates are normally too low to be of much interest for someone in the UK who has to pay the prices of things we have to pay here - so probably wouldn't have used it anyway. I think most of the tasks are probably based on typical rates for workers in India.
I agree with you, robertinventor, that MTurk does seem overly invested in its own secrecy, especially wrt getting good information to workers. Transcribing on MTurk is a special interest of mine, too, though I'm in the US. There's probably more than one thread on transcribing videos for SpeechInk, but here's the most recent one. As far as the wages being based on workers in India, I don't think that's directly true. From what I can tell, the biggest two transcription companies on MTurk really don't want workers who are not fluent in English, and many natives of India who want to work on MTurk do not punctuate and use grammar in a way that would be considered fluent by native English speakers. So I don't think there's any primary intent by the companies to follow Indian wage standards. However, it is true that most of the transcription work here pays below what is common for the industry away from MTurk, so in a de facto sense, you may be correct!
Can I work on H1b Visa on mturk?? Hi, I am currently residing in US on H1 b visa. Can anybody tell me whether I can work on Mturk in my spare time?