Can people please stop doing this? Or should we maybe start cracking down on it more?
I empathize if it’s a misunderstanding or if it’s someone new to iNat who doesn’t understand how to use those yet, but if people are doing this intentionally to shotgun blast their observation, please stop. It’s not helpful, it’s kind of frustrating when you’re searching for one type of evidence and see search results polluted by unrelated data.
Don’t know where else to put this, but if anything, perhaps this will be an educational post letting people who think this is beneficial to cut that out.
I tried to leave the user out of the image cause I didn’t want to single someone out. Basically the image in question was a photograph of a live organism. Just the organism alone. Not separate feathers, bones, constructions, or eggs. Just a simple organism picture. This has happened several times. When I search “feather” I get a lot of results of whole bird pictures, that doesn’t seem correct.
I get that some people may be uncertain of how to use the annotations, so maybe better education on that? Like, there is no reason to mark “egg” on a picture of a living adult bird without eggs.
I have seen this as well. On occasion, someone will select every annotation, which just means someone has to downvote them to get them off the scored annotations. Annoying, but that’s about it.
It’s very annoying. People who annotate EVERYTHING is exactly what I’m posting about. It eats a lot of ID time needlessly, also pollutes the data. I get we can all down vote it, but there is a frustratingly large glut of this kind of thing.
I do understand for some, they may not get how to use the annotations. So, maybe more education on proper usage would help?
I think the reason some people do this is because their logic is “the more annotations the more likely it is to get seen”, not neccessarily? Not everyone who can ID birds can ID eggs for example, so that logic really doesn’t apply.
If it seems like someone is making intentionally incorrect entries (on annotations or other parts of iNat like IDs, DQA, etc.), I would flag for curators to take a look there. In the case of annotations, I would flag the observation itself and leave a comment explaining the issue. You can also leave a polite comment mentioning the annotator and explaining the issue and how annotations should be used. Beginning iNat users may be making honest mistakes, though it is possible that these good be entered in bad faith too. If so, curators could suspend the user if they continue to engage in this type of behavior after being warned.
Yep, that’s why I’m being careful, I get there are honest mistakes, but might be time we track repeat offenders? Or put more “PSAs” out? Not sure. I get we can down vote, leave comments, etc. but there is a glut of it.
In the screen shot you shared it looked like only “organism” was marked as “yes,” but is what you’re saying that it was annotated as all of the above, and the down votes were added by you to counter them?
If so I can see the confusion over feather. I would not think to annotate a whole bird with “feather” because of course it has feathers. However, we do use annotations like “green leaves” “flowers” and “fruits” on whole plants that have those things visible, so it could get confusing.
Harder to defend annotating “egg” or “track” on a photo of a bird, unless someone speaks very little English and maybe misunderstood what that meant?
You could try politely messaging to ask why. If the response is “I always select false annotations to trick more people into seeing it.” That would be worth reporting to staff. More likely, most people are just confused and will (hopefully) stop.
Ya, that’s part of why some PSA or FAQ about what annotation means what could be helpful, like feather on a whole bird is one I can see the technical logic behind, even if it’s not quite right.
This post wasn’t just about the singular observation I screenshotted, I used it because it was a particularly bad one as it chose ALL POSSIBLE annotations, even ones that had no logical reason to make sense like “egg.”
There are other cases I’ve seen that aren’t as egregious as the one in the screenshot, I chose this one for a reason. It is a pattern I’ve noticed, that another user has also pointed out. Part of why I attempted to only show the annotation section is because I didn’t want to single this user out, more just bring up an ongoing issue I’ve noticed.
I thought about the English language barrier but I’m not entirely sure if that’s an issue here seeing as users aren’t obligated to choose English. I could see misunderstanding proper usage of them more.
Thank you for clarifying. I agree, clearer official instructions would be very helpful. Maybe even in the form of a popup, “when to use this annotation.”
And I think you did right by not revealing the observer’s identity here on the forum.
It looks like this person is agreeing or disagreeing with the fact that there is or is not “Evidence of Presence-Feather…etc” instead of agreeing or disagreeing with the vote of another person. It seems that they are disagreeing to the fact that there is a feather….
I don’t think that this person understands how this works, as they did agree to “organism”.
If a polite message does not work - and you have explained WHY it is a problem, pass it on. Annotations cannot be changed like IDs. Stacking up downvotes does not ‘achieve’ anything.
Sorry, I think you might be misunderstanding. The agrees and disagrees were me. The observation is a photo of a singular adult bird, and was annotated with all possible annotations. As noted earlier in the thread, there are ways in which people could be confused like feather on an adult organism, but hard to justify “track”, “egg”, or “construction” when all it is is an adult bird.
Hence the ideas of an FAQ for misunderstandings and more of a clear note that annotating everything isn’t helpful.
I think it does get the observation out of the search results. Like, if “scat” is down voted then it won’t appear if someone searched for scat pictures to ID.
Hey so quick question, how do you flag an observation on the app exactly? Other than flagging it as “captive/cultivated”? I’m not suggesting it’s not there, I’m just not 100% sure how to do that. Or does it have to be the website? Would cases like you’re suggesting be reported via the “inappropriate” flag option?
You have to flag on the website. Note that voting something as “captive/cultiveted” is not the same as flagging. Flagging is for inappropriate content (like an insult, or intentionally falsified data). Marking something as captive/cultivated is just using the Data Quality Assessment.
If you send me examples a help@inaturalist.org I can take a look, and you can share usernames, etc in that email.
Correct. Also, please use the quote function here on the forum, rather than making a separate response to each post. You can select the text you want to reply to, then click “Quote” and the text will appear in your post. You can write a response underneath it like I’m doing here. And you can add multiple quotes to one post. It keeps things a bit cleaner. This is different from a lot of forums, so it’s not obvious if you’re not familiar with it.
