Add a response to the page that can be used to paste on observations by curators or helpful users to explain to users how joke identifications are harmful, and to deter them from posting such an ID again. Any ideas, maybe someone can come up with an outline for how this should sound?
I’ve totally seen joke IDs. One I was recently tagged for was a new user who had identified his cat as a tiger. I disagreed with the ID and left this comment:
Sorry to spoil your fun @observer but iNaturalist isn’t really a place for joke-identifying pets. A few observations of your cat are okay, but mark them as Captive / Cultivated and if you must identify them as a tiger just withdraw the ID afterward.
(P.S. I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s clearly a lion!)
The last because I don’t want new users to think iNatters have no sense of humor!
There used to be a prepared response for joke IDs, but it’s so case-specific that I removed it at some point. Most people tend to be playing around with computer vision and adding an admonishing comment isn’t generally necessary. A correct ID is usually enough.
The definition of “joke ID” is variable, I suppose “troll ID” is better, aka an identification that is purely meant to disrupt the community and make everyone’s job harder. There are a lot of examples that have been flagged.
This response would be for literal troll IDs, not just a new user who’s just using the CV, which is perfectly fine. As I said, these are quite plentiful.
The same usually applies to trolling IDs. It’s often better to just reidentify rather than also comment and feed into their desire to try and rile someone up. More detailed info here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#trolls
I had one a while back that might have been trolling, they had uploaded a picture of a hummingbird on a line and were insisting it was a flicker to the several bird ID’ers that weighed in, some time passes and I forgot about it, until it showed up in my notifications again, now they “came to the conclusion” that it was a Pectoral Sandpiper. I got such good laugh out of that I didn’t care if they were trolling or serious. I just gently explained why it wasn’t a sandpiper and moved on. I still can’t tell that story without laughing, I hope they had as good a day as I did from that.