Are new users required to understand the differences between wild and cultivated when creating an account?

[nathantaylor]

I continually find myself frustrated with the situation with users not marking cultivated plants as cultivated. I want to create a feature request that requires new users to read about the differences between cultivated/captive and wild organisms AND click a button that says they agree to only upload captive/cultivated observations if they select captive/cultivated. I would also like pair this with a feature request for sterner penalties for repeatedly doing this after many warnings. Right now, the community guidelines says nothing against this unless you interpret it as intentionally marking the data quality assessment as incorrect (an interpretation that I don’t think anyone would hold to). This makes it easy for someone to continually upload their garden, not mark the observation properly, and have no ill consequences (to the contrary, someone who gets even mildly upset or says something that can be perceived as impolite can get into trouble; a situation I’ve recently stumbled on).

However, I’m unfamiliar with what new users actually experience at this time. As such, I need some information to make sure these feature requests aren’t redundant. For instance, has a popup system to warn users they may be uploading a captive/cultivated organism gone into affect? Do new users receive anything on this before they create their account? How about after?

I’m sorry if this is too blunt, but this situation about someone being flagged as “impolite” for trying to get an observer to actually respond so we can mark as cultivated has really frustrated me. If I weren’t constrained by my own good nature and the community guidelines, I would have far harsher words for the observer and the many other observers that simply don’t respond when asked.

Though, I imagine most observers don’t know any better, and that’s on us. We need to do better. However, the influx of new observations on iNaturalist is such that I don’t believe we can rely on individuals of our community to inform newbies about this anymore. Identifiers (the people most likely to actually do this work of teaching the new batch of observers) already have their hands full with the actual act of identifying. Though adding cultivated status is easy, doing a really thorough job is probably one of the least rewarding activities on this program. It’s so easy to make an observer upset at you (either because they think you marked something incorrect and you have to argue to justify why you did it or because you did accidently did mark something incorrect in the abundance of real cultivated organisms). Where you do exercise caution and try to ask the observer, less than half usually respond, which leaves unknown blots scattered throughout the occurrence records that researchers like me try to use. Just as frustrating, I sometimes go through the cultivated plants and find users that just mark everything they observe as cultivated! It’s not always cut and dried, but I simply don’t understand the people that don’t even make an effort.

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Main takeaways as of post 54:
Problem: New users don’t know how to mark cultivated plants as cultivated or may refuse to do so.
Target of these changes: 1. Users who are just getting introduced to the cultivated/wild dichotomy. 2. Users who know the differences, but don’t actually change the status because: a. they don’t know how, b. they can’t be bothered, or c. they deliberately keep plants as wild to get an ID.
Not target: 1. Users genuinely struggling with the cultivated/wild dichotomy. 2. Users with observations that uniquely fall in the gray zones between the two categories.
Potential solutions:

Guideline changes

1. Increase clarity in the Community Guidelines. This should read something similar to: Captive/Cultivated Organisms - These should be marked correctly as either captive/cultivated or wild (if you are not sure how to tell the difference, go here[link to help page]). There are inherent ambiguities regarding the difference between the above categories in some circumstances. However, users are expected to use their best judgment and be responsive to questions about this matter. Addresses 2.b directly and all others indirectly (though the development of the link for how to distinguish addresses target 1 directly).

Onboarding
2. Provide a tutorial that shows users how to mark an organism as cultivated when observers first create an account (app and website). This can be a broader tutorial that shows them how to do everything. Addresses target 2.a.
3. IF the Community Guidelines are amended, provide a link to community guidelines prior to account creation and make them check a box saying that “I agree to abide by the community guidelines.” This will not likely change any user’s behavior (that’s not the purpose of this). What this is designed for is to give us some teeth when dealing with these situations. Ultimately, we would then have clear justification to fall back on if/when a user gets annoyed at us or ghosts us. Addresses target 2.b. and indirectly target 1.
4. Add categories for captive/cultivated organisms so that being counted as casual can still be effectively curated. Many have talked about this before. Addresses target 2.c.
5. Create a tutorial for iNaturalist. Addresses target 1 directly.
a. Similar to discobot.

@AdamWargon

@discobot has a tutorial for how to use the Discourse platform (which is the platform that this iNat Forum runs on).

Could we, or should we, have a similar automated tutorial for using iNaturalist?

b. Strongly suggest taking photos of the entire plant in its context in addition to whatever other close-ups the observer wants to take (this helps address things that look like gray areas, but actually aren’t).
c. Videos

Though,

@spiphany

I don’t know if videos are the best solution. I do think more people are likely to look at videos or interactive tutorials than they are to read a written/illustrated guide, particularly if they are app users.

d. Guided walk through:

@deboas

One could also have one of those guided walk-throughs, an animation when you open the app that shows the steps to make an observation, including marking cultivated (and mentioning that the app is focused primarily on wild species).

6. Improve methods of finding or revisiting tutorials. Addresses target 1 directly (for those who didn’t get it the first time).

@spiphany

Both the help pages and the “getting started” guides are hidden away under “more” on the tabs on the top menu, which means that one has to be actively looking for it.

@DianaStuder

But Help - should be immediately visible, without us having to hunt for it.

7. Create pop ups, automatic messages, banners, or alerts to inform users that they should mark things as cultivated. This could be paired with a reminder that it is apart of the community guidelines to take this seriously.
   though,

@spiphany

if I understand correctly – there has been a preference to avoid pop-ups and similar methods on iNat because these are felt to be annoying and intrusive, and given that many of the more complex aspects of iNat require conscious decisions (thinking about whether something is wild or not, choosing an ID, cropping photos or taking pictures of particular features, etc.) and can be conveyed more effectively through actively imparting information rather than “nudges” that push the user towards certain behaviors, there don’t seem to be a lot of remaining options for improving onboarding.

a. Based on proportion of observations marked cultivated:

@m_whitson

Would it be possible at some point to have something like a pop up message? For example, if a user with less than X observations had more than Y marked ‘captive/cultivated’ to get a pop up message like, “Several of your observations have been marked captive/cultivated. It’s really helpful if you can do that yourself, but we realize it’s often hard to decide. Here are some quick tips…”

@Italopithecus

Maybe a “counter” that counts how many observations of a given user have been marked by that user or by others could be useful. If the proportion is too high in favor of “others”, that user could receive an automatic warning.

If an observer has all cultivated plants, we could perhaps create an automatic message that suggests other apps designed for sharing cultivated plants.

@Italopithecus

If they are only interested in non-wild organisms or do not have the sensitivity to notice wild things, we could consider the possibility to politely try to suggest them to take into account to look for something else.

b. Based on how many observations an observer has added:

@deboas

Or a pop-up or banner once a user has made their first/fifth/tenth plant observation: “Congratulations on making your first/fifth/tenth plant observation on iNaturalist! Please make sure to mark each observation as cultivated (e.g. garden plants, street trees, crops) or wild (weeds and other plants not planted by humans)”

c. When trying to upload an observation.

@tiwane

FWIW iNat Next has some built-in user interface “hints”, such as the Save/Submit buttons being grayed out unless the observation has a date, location, evidence, and ID, and an alert that tells you it’s missing one of those things if you tap on Save or Submit. I think an alert there for new users could work.

@guerrichache

For things like captive/wild, you could require that they manually select an option, rather than having the field default to one or the other.

8. Make users take test before using site.

@bbk-htx

Some websites require you to at least read through the guide, and in some cases take a simple test before using their site.

9. Weekly tips

@spiphany

It seems like “tips to improve your observations” might be more attractive than “how to use iNat”, and this could be presented in bite-sized portions

10. Provide a box immediately after(?) account creation that describes what iNaturalist is and what it is not.

@Italopithecus

Few days ago a user with hundreds observations who made a relative high number of obs of clearly cultivated plants replied that was thinking that iNat was just a photo sharing app.

@dgwdoesthings

I think a certain percentage of the large number of cultivated plants come from many new users using iNaturalist as an identification tool. Instead of using Seek or another similar app that meets their needs.

@dgwdoesthings

I think it’s important to let new users know that iNat is not the proper place for cultivated plants but to also direct them to what they should do instead.

@Italopithecus

But I also think that in some cases we should realize that for some users it is simply iNat that does not fit for them. If they are only interested in non-wild organisms or do not have the sensitivity to notice wild things, we could consider the possibility to politely try to suggest them to take into account to look for something else.

11. Probationary period while users figure things out.

@JaneBP

During the probationary period the number of observations they can make should be limited (so there is a limited amount to review). After a period of time with no erroneous observations, they would be like everyone else

[earthknight]

They’re not required to, but everyone is encouraged to read the overview of how the site works as well as the FAQs and the like.

However a lot of even well established users have never read those, and there are plenty of long-time users who are a bit confused about the wild/cultivated issue. And a lot of folks who know the difference, but who forget to mark them as such.

Honestly, it doesn’t really bother me all that much. It’s an easy thing to correct when you see it. That said, I do agree that more care taken during observations and identifications would be a good thing.

[nathantaylor]

@earthknight

However a lot of even well established users have never read those, and there are plenty of long-time users who are a bit confused about the wild/cultivated issue. And a lot of folks who know the difference, but who forget to mark them as such.

I agree, and this doesn’t bother me that much nor is what I’m proposing an attempt to address this issue. Many established users don’t need to read the guides used to help distinguish between cultivated and wild [EDITED: I had guidelines before for some reason]. I confess that I have not. But I would be willing to be forced to read it if it helped address the issue I outlined above.

The problem I’m referring to here are observers who don’t even try or don’t even know to try. It’s the hundreds of “x” buttons I have to press in a week to keep the map cleaned up or the hundreds of year-long unanswered questions asking “is this cultivated?” That stuff really bothers me after a while. And the more I try to actually make a difference on this issue, the more it depresses me.

[david99]

As far as I can tell, it’s not strictly against the rules to post cultivated plants and not mark the captive button. That’s part of the social aspect of iNat, like it or not, where you can post your observations and let others sort them out. It’s not always clear what is and isn’t planted in a park or garden, and many people haven’t even thought about that question before. So that person uploading dozens of garden plants might think they count as wild.

People obviously should mark observations as captive if they know they are captive, but how to do so is not really intuitive via the app. I don’t actually know how, I always go back and change it on the computer, come to think of it.

[nathantaylor]

@david99

As far as I can tell, it’s not strictly against the rules to post cultivated plants and not mark the captive button.

Yeah, kind of my point. It’s not against the rules and no mention is made in the guidelines, but I think there should be. Just say you shouldn’t do this. We all make mistakes, but you shouldn’t do this. If you continually don’t do this and many people have told you not to do it and how to mark it, we are able to warn you that you’re violating the guidelines. I don’t want this to be sever, but only enough so that the observers know that this is something our community finds very important.

@david99

People obviously should mark observations as captive if they know they are captive, but how to do so is not really intuitive via the app. I don’t actually know how, I always go back and change it on the computer, come to think of it.

That’s good to know. Sounds like training on this would be necessary. If you have an iPhone, all you have to do is scroll down to “Captive/Cultivated” after taking your photo. Select that and hit “yes”.

[duncanross]

From time I’ve spent modding various things, it doesn’t matter how well explained something is, how concisely explained something is, people simply will not read it and will do it anyway.

[Thunderhead]

You put that pressure on yourself to push all those buttons and frustrate yourself.
The point of iNaturalist is to interact with nature and make posts of what we encounter.
Phone app users don’t necessarily even see all the choices of “buttons” to push. DQA ,Annotations and Observation fields are often missed.
I believe users catch on to what they need to do and that we are more expected to meet each user where they are. Creating more demanding rules is not going to be more user friendly.
My suggestion is to not take it so personally.

[DianaStuder]

@nathantaylor

Identifiers (the people most likely to actually do this work of teaching the new batch of observers) already have their hands full with the actual act of identifying.

and since you are a taxon specialist keeping your data in order - don’t take it so personally is … words fail me.

As a taxon specialist, you are not the only one fighting that battle. See all the comments across almost 2 years.
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/joe_fish/74452-taxonomy-strike

No wonder some delete their profile, as they leave.

[lynnharper]

I will confess that when I am working to ID Unknowns nowadays, I often simply mark a house plant or a clear garden plant as cultivated, and then move on without giving any ID at all. I try to be patient, I try to be helpful, but at the rate new observations are coming in (not just Unknowns), I am tipping more and more towards weeding out early the observers who don’t read or don’t understand the Getting Started documents. Unfortunately, this also weeds out students whose teachers do a lousy job of explaining iNaturalist or a lousy job of looking over their students’ observations.

How many hundreds of millions of observers do we want, anyway? Sure, there are plenty of countries where there should be more observers (and not just tourists), but in my US state of Massachusetts, there are currently 90,291 observers, a little over 1% of the population. Is that enough? What is “enough,” anyway? Do we want 5% of the human population to care enough about biodiversity to be using iNaturalist? Well, sure, we want at least 5% to care a lot about biodiversity, but maybe we - meaning the iNat community, staff, and infrastructure - can’t actually cope with that 5% mark.

Sorry, I’m getting off-topic here, but as iNat grows without establishing clear on-boarding for new observers, we all run the risk of burning out the dedicated identifiers upon which this community and its data depend.

[oksanaetal]

It’s not difficult to mark obs as not wild, and not much harder to alert the new user about the captive/cultivated checkbox. I think that your idea would be hard to implement, as many people would just scan through the guidelines without reading much.

[DianaStuder]

Because of iNat’s - if it is Not Wild it does not Need an ID
I add my ID, then push it to Casual after the second ID rolls in.
(Identifying is made a little bit easier because sometimes iNat pre-empts with this sp here is Not Wild)

[tallastro]

Maybe a 3rd choice on the various forms would help? Wild (Yes), Cultivated/Captive (No), or Cultivated but I’d like an ID. I would ID those. I don’t want to see all the bad location, no date, no media versions of “Casual”.

[nathantaylor]

This is the saddest comment I’ve read today:

“In my brief conversations with tiwane and loarie, the impression I got was that they regard this site more as social media than a serious research tool, and so heavy-handed tools like Blocking fit their viewpoint.”

I have to say, over the years (I’ve been on here 10 years now), I’ve felt the same way. Frankly, it’s stuff like this that makes me question whether iNaturalist is actually the place for me. If the admins are going to place the needs of the masses over the needs of those who curated the dataset that they benefit from then I don’t know if I belong here. Honestly, it makes me feel a bit used (the computer vision tool for most of the US Euphorbias is built on my identifications). This started out as a community of naturalists interested in learning from one another and building a database we all benefit from. The community goals were always oriented towards balancing the social aspect with the science aspect. Over time, it’s felt like more and more problems directly related to curating data have been ignored. We have scored a few wins, but it always feels like an afterthought to onboarding new users, many of which don’t even care. But if the scientist’s leave, iNaturalist will fall slowly deteriorate into chaos. What will there be to attract new users? I never viewed iNaturalist as a social media site and never wanted it to become that. I suspect most of the users who started out contributing to this site feel the same way.

[nathantaylor]

After reading the comments, I realize there may be a disconnect here. I believe that those who willfully upload cultivated plants without marking them as such ARE violating our community standards (I’m not talking about mistakes or gray areas or anything like that, but willfully ignoring these categories). The problem is two-fold:

1. Those standards ARE NOT written into the community guidelines (they used to be; there was a day when cultivated plants were treated as spam!).
2. As far as I know, NOTHING is done in the beginning to even tell new users that this is a thing they should do.

What I need to know is if 2 is true. If it isn’t, then I only need one feature request. If 2 is true, than I need 2 requests. Then we can let the votes fall where they may and the admins do what they will. The only reason I went into my frustrations is to try emphasize just how serious this problem is. I’m not the only one who has had this concern. This concern has been around for years now and raised by multiple people. I hope iNaturalist listens.

[AdamWargon]

@discobot has a tutorial for how to use the Discourse platform (which is the platform that this iNat Forum runs on).

Could we, or should we, have a similar automated tutorial for using iNaturalist?

[discobot]

Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.

[spiphany]

I think there are a couple of types of users who upload cultivated plants without marking them as such:

1. New users who have never previously engaged with nature in any serious way and therefore never thought about the difference between wild and captive and just think “flowers = nature”. These users would benefit from better onboarding. I don’t think that giving them a text to read and click on before they can upload observations would be effective (what do you do with the “terms of use” or cookie notices that pop up on many websites?). I think making short, accessible video tutorials that are visible somewhere prominent on the website and the app (not hidden in a tab on the top menu bar or absent altogether) would be a good start.

2. Users who are aware that cultivated plants should be marked as not wild but choose not to do so, either deliberately or because they don’t care enough to bother. I think here it would be important to know more about their motivations. I suspect in many cases it is because they have learned that if they upload as “cultivated” from the start it will become casual and lumped with observations that are defective or missing data and nobody will look at them at all. The longstanding feature request to treat non-wild observations separately from observations with other problems would probably help. It might not guarantee that people look at them but it might reduce the perception that “casual” is a badge of shame and to be avoided at all cost.

[wildskyflower]

@spiphany

The longstanding feature request to treat non-wild observations separately from observations with other problems would probably help.

I think that implementing this system would go a long way to reducing this kind of conflict. The issues that I think are producing the dispute in this case aren’t potted plants, which would be just ‘hit x and move on’. These are cases where it isn’t obvious to the IDer from the photo whether or not the plant was captive. In such cases it may not be reasonable to expect an average observer to know whether it was captive or not, even if asked.

For some examples I have seen:
1.) A scraggly plant growing in a patch of unkempt dirt halfway under a log, voted captive, without comment, by multiple local experts. They must be basing this on local or expert knowledge, but it wouldn’t be obvious to nearly any ordinary observer.
2.) A plant that to me is obviously a sterile hybrid cultivar on the side of the hiking trail miles from the trailhead. Someone has to have planted it there, that is the only explanation, so I voted it ‘captive’ even though the observer insisted (reasonably, to them) it could not have been in comments.
3.) Non-native bushes expanding in what appears to be an invasive pattern in an abandoned lot, with locals requesting that such observations be marked captive because the species isn’t native. The observer was probably right to not mark it captive, but how could they prove it other than saying ‘well look at the picture, it it doesn’t look captive, does it?’

The inherent conflict in all of these cases would be reduced if there was still a system for IDing those observations. It would also be helpful if taxon experts can take time to educate observers about the kinds of clues that lead them to believe that an observation is cultivated. This can be frustrating work because many observers won’t understand or be able to apply the rules, even if they are trying.

[paul_dennehy]

@spiphany

users who have never previously engaged with nature in any serious way and therefore never thought about the difference between wild and captive

Even as a user who’d been on here doing moth IDs for years, when I started posting plants and trying to learn them about 2 years ago, I had literally no idea what plants were and weren’t cultivated. If you’re interested in plants, it may seem intuitive that a Bradford pear on a suburban street was planted there by a human, that a multiflora rose growing along a driveway got there on its own while a row of hyacinths growing along the same driveway were placed there deliberately, or that the Chinese silver-grass in front of a restaurant is a landscaping plant while the Japanese stilt-grass around it is not. These things are not intuitive to someone new to botany with no concept of what any plants are. When I first started posting plants, I got several of the copypasta “welcome to iNaturalist! the way we do things here is, we mark these as captive because you can tell they were planted because of the way they are” comments, which I frankly found a bit condescending. I was about 100,000 IDs in at this point, fully understood the way Captive/Cultivated was supposed to work, but I was honestly so oblivious about plant life that everything just looked like green blobs of botany with flowers ‘n’ stuff popping out, and the idea that someone could take one look at a plant and say “someone put that there on purpose” seemed like a superpower to me. So I don’t think this is as simple as informing new users what “cultivated” means… it’s easy to say “come on, this is obviously planted”, but it’s not obvious to everyone.

[nathantaylor]

@wildskyflower

The issues that I think are producing the dispute in this case aren’t potted plants, which would be just ‘hit x and move on’.

Once again, I want to clarify that I’m not talking about the gray areas. Also, I do find the cases where there is little dispute to be an issue and I’m tired of pretending that these aren’t an issue. I’ve ran into many instances where observers who don’t know what they’re doing observe cultivated plants and follow-up with observations where you can’t tell (close-ups only). Yes, they’re easy to curate, but they shouldn’t even be there in the first place and this practice of ignoring them with a quick “x” avoids teaching those who seriously need instruction. In my mind, these individuals are unknowingly violating an unspoken community standard that we all mostly agree with. If these observers were reached and were trying to learn while or before they started posting the difficult ones, we would have fewer of the observations that cause issues.

@wildskyflower

It would also be helpful if taxon experts can take time to educate observers about the kinds of clues that lead them to believe that an observation is cultivated.

This isn’t practical anymore with the sheer mass of observers and observations we currently have. Just in Euphorbia, there are 489,000 observations and over 129,000 observers. I’m the main person curating Euphorbia. I don’t have that kind of time nor is it reasonable for anyone to expect me to take that kind of time to do that work. We have to differentiate between what is “helpful” in the ideal sense and what is “practical” for actually addressing the issues.