I know there are some users who don’t want escaped garden plants that will likely not establish an enduring population to be included on range maps, so they will mark such observations as “not wild” regardless of whether or not the observer includes a note, and regardless of how obvious it is from the photo that the specimen was not planted. How you deal with it may depend on how eager you are to engage in the same debates over and over.
I enjoy observing plants that have escaped cultivation, too, and I’ve found a few things help: leaving a note; making sure that the first photo is one that clearly shows the context (i.e., instead of an easily IDable close-up, using one where the thumbnail includes the expanse of concrete that the plant is growing out of); preemptively marking such observations as wild (which will counter a single “not-wild” vote); and periodically checking my observations to see if there are any that are casual and are not supposed to be. Sometimes people will accidentally click on this button – it is easy to do if one is using the “Identify” module – so it never hurts to check for casuals even if one does not regularly observe borderline cases.
I will admit that I do sometimes mark observations of obviously cultivated plants (indoor plants in pots, manicured flower beds, city trees, etc.) as “not wild” without providing an ID. Sometimes I will comment that I have marked it as not wild; however, if there are multiple cultivated observations by the same observer (there often are), I don’t see a need to comment every time I mark one.
The reason I don’t provide an ID is because I often don’t know what it is beyond “one of those showy garden plants”. The majority of these observations are probably more of interest to sociologists than botanists, so I also don’t see any great benefit in spending a lot of time on them if I don’t happen to know what it is off the top of my head. Some IDers don’t mark even obviously cultivated plants as not wild, which can quickly result in the observations becoming research grade, so I do prefer to at least mark such observations rather than skipping them and leaving them for the next person to deal with.
If it is a new user I will try to find a few of their observations that I do recognize and provide an ID for encouragement, along with a note that the focus of iNat is really on wild organisms and not pets or ornamental garden plants.
Sometimes users don’t really seem to need an ID – they are posting photos of plants in botanical gardens or at garden centers where it would be easy to check the label if they want to know what it is.
For identifying unknown houseplants or garden plants, there are other websites and apps that will probably serve this purposes better. Because the CV isn’t necessarily trained on pictures of cultivated plants – which may look different than wild ones – and because it doesn’t include hybrids, it often doesn’t recognize ornamentals as reliably as it does wild plants. This isn’t quite as bad with the new geomodel, which no longer excludes non-wild observations from the “expected nearby” suggestions, but I still see odd suggestions.