I have experienced this as well, likely with the same individual(s), and I now exclude Africa from my identification efforts to avoid it.
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Only a couple that I can think of, so theyāre a very small minority. I often find that theyāre new-ish users. The users that I personally have to have more patience for are those who submit observations that have about twelve photos of all sorts of different organisms in them. Again, theyāre mostly new users. Weāve had a few of those since the bushfires. I or others typically leave a friendly comment, and those who are more diligent will respond and split their big observations up.
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In cases like this, I advise them that before it was labeled as Plants, it was effectively totally invisible to almost everyone except a few people who sift through unlabeled items. Not everybody understands that issue at first.
Additionally if you can follow up to call something Tracehophyta or Angiosperm a little beyond Plantae to however far you can know it, that models how people can move it forward to the best of their ability.
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The site is well aware of who this is and their pattern of behaviour. Barring site action which they appear unwilling to take, they will not stop their replies, and will likely get more aggressive in their responses.
As noted above, I would recommend adding either to your search url.
not_in_place=113055 or
not_user_id=123456 (replace the 123456 with the userid of the user in question. It does not seem to work using their user name. To get the user id, go to their profile page and add .json to the url, note the first element called id which is their userid)
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Almost certainly with the same invididual. Kinda bothers me that a curatorās slowing down the improvement of data so much. Itās kinda putting favouritism on the plants he cherishes, but asks every other kingdom of life to suffer due to his field of interest.
I mean, he wasnāt using vulgar language, but he is asking me to use the site in a way that itās not meant to be used. Heās a curator so he must know of some rule that iām breaking to feel like he can ask me not to label a plant a plant, otherwise, heās hurting the community and the site.
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I do when I can :) usually a lot easier for me to specify animal classes, and fungi classes than plants tho
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Iām also a curator and can tell you you are not breaking any rule.
If a user asks you to not interact with their records, you should do your best to do so, hence the tips on search parameters above.
You are under absolutely no obligation to apply his feedback to any observations other than his.
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Iāll do my best. I mean, I canāt keep track of which countries he travels to without devoting all my time to him, I can focus on north america for a while, but eventually that mess heās created in the unknown section is gonna get tackled outside of my continent.
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Indeed, I operate on line-of-sight and I go continent independent, so any specific-focus observation I stumble across eventually, by whomever, will get some kind of label even if itās just āLifeā if thatās the best I can do. ;)
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Well, just asking is okay, especially on oneās own observations, probably, as long as it isnāt presented as a āyou mustā.
Two things:
- If itās who I am thinking of, when weāve crossed paths, I can personally say that heās never told me that I shouldnāt coarse ID. He spoke up when I accidentally forgot to copy the placeholder when I added my coarse ID on another userās observation (especially pertinent as I think the placeholder may have been the result of another site or app not transferring, in which case from the observerās perspective I replaced good data with vague). Even then though, it was an oblique thing where he commented to the observer that if heād seen the placeholder, he wouldnāt have agreed with my coarse ID which was relatively valuelessā¦which I thought was a fair point.
- Curators arenāt staff, so they can make mistakes in handling people. I consider the person I am thinking of as a bit brusque, but that seems to be because he is passionate about taxonomy and the potential for citizen science, especially for users new to iNat coming from other platforms.
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I am sorry if you exclude Africa. We have a desperate need for all the ID help we can get.
(Except that one - if we could get, that one, to put the Plant ID on up front, we could all continue to iNat, together)
There is also this long discussion
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-do-some-serious-power-users-add-so-many-unknown-observations/282
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Iāve only had one once, a user from Britain who was incredibly upset and angry that I put a family level ID on his flower.
I tried to explain that if he didnāt want other people to suggest an ID he could turn off ācommunity IDā, or he could easily over-ride my ID by putting in his species-level ID (in the family I suggested) but he was VERY ANGRY ABOUT IT AND COULD ONLY TYPE IN CAPITALS SO STRONG WAS HIS EMOTION. But, other than that one person I have had no issues.
I keep an eye on my dashboard so if anyone disagrees with one of my IDs I can review whether to withdraw it. I find it helps me improve my identification skills.
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agreed. good to do it in spurts so you donāt miss comments. usually a flurry of notifications after 10 minutes of coarse IDing. Easy to make dumb mistakes and called a snake a plant every now and again and its good to be ready to be called out on it lol.
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Itās going to be interesting to see how quickly the number of āunknownsā decrease now that so many of us are under lockdown/quarantine/shelter in place.
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So far so good by the looks of it. Most self-isolators are indefinite, so I could be here a while, others as well. I basically saw the homepage suggestion to use my time on lockdown for IDs and took it literally and just started doing this recently. Normally stuck to fungi prior to this week.
How many unknowns get uploaded per day in north america? I donāt know if it was going down before this week, but itās ever so slightly dropping now.
Just mentally trying to estimate how many people it would take to work on that section before itās under control, based on my own recent activity
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I dont think even in normal times there is a consistent number of unknowns that get loaded.
Weekends are higher, and given that North America represents about 70% of observations, it can be very seasonal as more northern parts of the US and in particular Canada have very seasonal volumes of entries which spike as weather and observing opportunities improve.
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I think Iāve gotten the same reply from the same person. Iām relatively new to the community and wanted to find a way to contribute when Spring has not quite sprung where I live yet so decided to try IDing. I read the guides first and then jumped in. The reply they sent put me off for a few days worried that I had broken some rule. I then decided to go search for their observations that were unknown and marked them all as reviewed so that I wouldnāt accidentally ID something of theirs again. Iāve also decided to restrict my IDing to anything added in 2018 to avoid IDing anything just added that the contributor hasnāt had time to get back to yet.
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I donāt think Iāve had the same person as you, because I tend to stick to Europe, but I know it really hurts when someone tells you that youāre using the site wrong when youāre using it right. Thankfully I recognise the first person I had trouble with (who does at least seem to have stopped leaving all their hybrids as placeholders), and the second said they were leaving the site, so I have no ideas about what one does with a stuck-in-wrong-ways curator.
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Cathy,
It might be worth considering trying the url exclusions I detailed above rather than doing things since than 2018.
- it looks like you are in a different part of the world than this user, filtering out by geography will remove far fewer records than the date exclusion, especially given the site growth in the past 2 years
- stuff that old has a high chance of legitimately not being identifiable. There is a good chance others doing the same thing have already looked at it
- if neither of these appeal to you, it looks like you are interested in mushrooms. There are a massive number of observations at the level of fungi, gilled mushrooms etc that can be reviewed to see if they can be advanced.
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