Allow curators to lock editing of taxon photos

The request is to add a button to the edit taxon page e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa//edit which would block non-curators from editing the taxon photos. Such a block already exists for Homo sapiens, so hopefully it appears the feature already exists for admins and this request extends that ability to curators.

This is to prevent the revolving door of photos on charismatic taxa (garter snakes, plantae, cats, etc) where people frequently change the photo for self promotion of their own photo.

See the full discussion here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/taxon-photos-are-editable-by-many-people-leading-to-abuse/67614

I think I’d be OK for observose, higher-level taxa. In general I haven’t come across many real issues but I’m definitely not as into the taxonomy as many others are. If I see a new photo for, say, Plantae, I’m usually thinking “OK, well I guess that photo has its time in the sun until it gets changed.”

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I must admit to being rather shocked when I discovered a while back that any user, such as myself, could add or change a taxon photo.

The proposal of locking them seems okay as a way to curb abuse, but I see a couple of issues.

First, I don’t think curators should be able to lock taxon photos when the photo is their own. That could obviously lead to abuse and unnecessary tensions.

Second, what if a curator locks a poor photo that is the best available at that time, but then quits as curator. It would then be a hassle to try to get the photo updated/improved. Perhaps the locks should have an expiration period and/or the number of photos that a curator can lock should be limited to, e.g. 10.

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Given that this feature request comes after a lengthy discussion of pros and cons of different approaches, do you want to propose any more specific details about how this would work? I’m thinking that a more detailed proposal might get more support and it might be easier for iNat staff to determine whether it’s feasible.

For example:

  • Is the button available to all curators and for any taxon?
  • If photos are locked for a taxon, does that mean that curators can still edit them (I think that’s your intent), or do they need to unlock the taxon?
  • What guidance would you suggest about how and when curators should use the “Lock Photos” button?
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Taxon photos more then ever have importance and real impact. Because the CV now uses any taxon photos when using the CV. Very poor taxon image choices, even if the 12th one can have an impact on 100s if not 1000s of other people trying to use the CV to identify their observations.

I strongly support something changing to help lock more taxa from harmful photo changes.

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In case there’s any confusion about this, the taxon photos do not have any special role in determining the species suggestions that computer vision (CV) offers. Those are based on the similarity between the photo on the current observation and an essentially random selection of several hundred photos of each species that was chosen for CV training (with some logic to prioritize related species and those expected nearby).

But once CV has determined its top suggestions for your observation, for each species the first photo it will show you is the most similar one it can find among the taxon photos for that species.

iNat has always shown users taxon photos as examples of what a species looks like. The only difference is that instead of always showing you these in the same sequence, the first photo is now the one that seems most similar to your observation. This means that if you saw a caterpillar, you’re more likely to see pictures of various caterpillars, and if you saw a plant with fruits, you’ll probably see other plants with fruits.

It’s still important for the 12 taxon photos to include a good range of representative views of that species in a sequence from “most typical” through “other common forms” to “important variants”.

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Personally I have not come across any situations where there have been ‘edit wars’ over taxon photos so I can’t comment much on how useful this would be. But I certainly think it would be best to limit this to taxa with a certain number of observations. There’s no point in locking out non-curators for taxa with only a handful of sightings.

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I would assume it would be something curators would only do if there were some good reason, such as edit wars or possibly very high level taxa - which I can’t imagine are likely to come up very often?

(The closest I’ve seen to an edit war was once when I looked at taxon photos for a species and decided that flower, flower, flower, flower, flower, flower wasn’t very helpful, so I edited to add photos of seeds, leaves etc. - and next time I looked at the taxon, found someone had changed it more or less back to flowers that weren’t even very representative of the flowers I’ve seen. I decided I couldn’t be bothered fighting and left it - though, to be fair, I might care more with some other species.)

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The iNat help page “What guidelines should I follow when choosing taxon photos?” says

If there are repeated changes, please flag the taxon and tag the users involved in the changes to have a discussion. Staff may lock a taxon’s photos in the event of an unresolved edit war.

For those who have had issues with users repeatedly changing taxon photos, has this recourse been used, or has it been used and not led to a solution? Or is the problem so prevalent that further limitations are necessary?

I do think having representative, diagnostic taxon photos is important (for the reasons noted above), especially for species and some other lower-ranked taxa. However, it feels like it gets more difficult to pick representative taxon photos for higher-level taxa (e.g. what is a “representative” plant?), and it may not really be as vitally important, since such high-level taxa are not usually suggested by the CV.

I do get a bit thrown off when taxon photos change for taxa I see a lot (plantae, tracheophyta, monocots, dicots), but it’s also kind of neat to see what new picture gets chosen. Still, it’s not really that representative or helpful when 9 of the 11 taxon photos for Kingdom Plantae are tracheophytes (and 6 of those are dicots…). In addition, many of those (admittedly very cool) photos are of species with under 50 global observations. The help page does say photos should “show diagnostic features of the taxon” and “Focus on the most common morphs and variants rather than unusual ones” (though perhaps that advice is geared more towards species, not kingdoms).

Would people be more inclined to pick Angiospermae rather than Plantae for their flower photos if the leading taxon photos for those weren’t both flowering plants, and the latter were an alga or something? I don’t know (and I suspect adding algae pics as Plantae taxon photos will get me into an edit war from which I would not emerge victorious…). Maybe the leading photos like we currently have for Animalia, Vertebrata, Mammalia—a tiled group of 4-9 different photos—would be better for such diverse high-level taxa?

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For ease of implimentation, I was thinking it should be available under every taxon.

If photos are locked, yes I think it would still make sense for curators to be able to edit them. That way if somebody flags the taxon and requests a genuinely good photo to be added, then it could be added.

For guidance, I think a lot of that was already laid out in the other thread, but it would be for taxa which have their photos frequently changed (can see via the taxon history) especially where one user is repeatedly modifying the photos.

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For all the other curator available settings on iNat, they can be changed by any curator. I intend for this to be the same. Therefore, if a locked taxon had a poor photo, a flag could be made to either have any curator update the photo or unlock the photos.

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Here’s a few examples mentioned in the linked thread:

[3 links removed by moderator]

Heads up that I removed the links above as we aim to keep discussions on the forum general rather than discuss individual cases where users’ actions may be perceived as inappropriate. (If need be, feel free to use the direct messaging system to discuss specific cases)

As someone who has many times added photos to species without a photo, or changed out to a good photo from a shyte one that was best available, I would think this is a good idea to have an observation count cut off. I’m guessing curators don’t need more work, when there are plenty of non curators who are very good in their areas of expertise.

Another option would be not locked by default, but taxons doing weird things, you could lock to curator only (how much does that actually occur? no idea, i don’t do much in “charismatic” species haha).

Ditto.

I have never seen a taxon photo war. Maybe that’s because I confine my fiddling to the species level and generally to species with fewer than 100 observations.

That’s my feeling, too. I can see locking the taxon photos in cases where less-diagnostic photos tend to be promoted, but in most cases, I don’t see why it matters. The OP mentioned cats; how is it harmful to rotate pictures of cats?

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