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

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 donā€™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 Iā€™ve recently stumbled on).

However, Iā€™m unfamiliar with what new users actually experience at this time. As such, I need some information to make sure these feature requests arenā€™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?

Iā€™m sorry if this is too blunt, but this situation about someone being flagged as ā€œimpoliteā€ for trying to get an observer to actually respond so we can mark as cultivated has really frustrated me. If I werenā€™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 donā€™t respond when asked.

Though, I imagine most observers donā€™t know any better, and thatā€™s on us. We need to do better. However, the influx of new observations on iNaturalist is such that I donā€™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. Itā€™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! Itā€™s not always cut and dried, but I simply donā€™t understand the people that donā€™t even make an effort.


Main takeaways as of post 54:
Problem: New users donā€™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 donā€™t actually change the status because: a. they donā€™t know how, b. they canā€™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 ā€œI agree to abide by the community guidelines.ā€ This will not likely change any userā€™s behavior (thatā€™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.

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 arenā€™t).
c. Videos

Though,

d. Guided walk through:

  1. Improve methods of finding or revisiting tutorials. Addresses target 1 directly (for those who didnā€™t get it the first time).
  1. 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,

a. Based on proportion of observations marked cultivated:

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

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

c. When trying to upload an observation.

  1. Make users take test before using site.
  1. Weekly tips
  1. Provide a box immediately after(?) account creation that describes what iNaturalist is and what it is not.
  1. Probationary period while users figure things out.
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Theyā€™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 doesnā€™t really bother me all that much. Itā€™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.

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I agree, and this doesnā€™t bother me that much nor is what Iā€™m proposing an attempt to address this issue. Many established users donā€™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 Iā€™m referring to here are observers who donā€™t even try or donā€™t even know to try. Itā€™s the hundreds of ā€œxā€ buttons I have to press in a week to keep the map cleaned up or the hundreds of year-long unanswered questions asking ā€œis this cultivated?ā€ 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.

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As far as I can tell, itā€™s not strictly against the rules to post cultivated plants and not mark the captive button. Thatā€™s part of the social aspect of iNat, like it or not, where you can post your observations and let others sort them out. Itā€™s not always clear what is and isnā€™t planted in a park or garden, and many people havenā€™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 donā€™t actually know how, I always go back and change it on the computer, come to think of it.

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Yeah, kind of my point. Itā€™s not against the rules and no mention is made in the guidelines, but I think there should be. Just say you shouldnā€™t do this. We all make mistakes, but you shouldnā€™t do this. If you continually donā€™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 youā€™re violating the guidelines. I donā€™t want this to be sever, but only enough so that the observers know that this is something our community finds very important.

Thatā€™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 ā€œCaptive/Cultivatedā€ after taking your photo. Select that and hit ā€œyesā€.

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From time Iā€™ve spent modding various things, it doesnā€™t matter how well explained something is, how concisely explained something is, people simply will not read it and will do it anyway.

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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 donā€™t necessarily even see all the choices of ā€œbuttonsā€ 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.

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and since you are a taxon specialist keeping your data in order - donā€™t take it so personally is ā€¦ 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.

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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 donā€™t read or donā€™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 studentsā€™ 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 ā€œenough,ā€ 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 - canā€™t actually cope with that 5% mark.

Sorry, Iā€™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.

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Itā€™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.

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Because of iNatā€™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)

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Maybe a 3rd choice on the various forms would help? Wild (Yes), Cultivated/Captive (No), or Cultivated but Iā€™d like an ID. I would ID those. I donā€™t want to see all the bad location, no date, no media versions of ā€œCasualā€.

This is the saddest comment Iā€™ve read today:

ā€œIn 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.ā€

I have to say, over the years (Iā€™ve been on here 10 years now), Iā€™ve felt the same way. Frankly, itā€™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 donā€™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, itā€™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 donā€™t even care. But if the scientistā€™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.

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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 (Iā€™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 isnā€™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. Iā€™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.

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@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?

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

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 ā€œflowers = natureā€. These users would benefit from better onboarding. I donā€™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 ā€œterms of useā€ 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.
  1. Users who are aware that cultivated plants should be marked as not wild but choose not to do so, either deliberately or because they donā€™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 ā€œcultivatedā€ 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 ā€œcasualā€ is a badge of shame and to be avoided at all cost.
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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 arenā€™t potted plants, which would be just ā€˜hit x and move onā€™. These are cases where it isnā€™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 wouldnā€™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 ā€˜captiveā€™ 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 isnā€™t native. The observer was probably right to not mark it captive, but how could they prove it other than saying ā€˜well look at the picture, it it doesnā€™t look captive, does it?ā€™

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 wonā€™t understand or be able to apply the rules, even if they are trying.

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Even as a user whoā€™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 werenā€™t cultivated. If youā€™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 ā€œwelcome 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 areā€ 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 ā€˜nā€™ stuff popping out, and the idea that someone could take one look at a plant and say ā€œsomeone put that there on purposeā€ seemed like a superpower to me. So I donā€™t think this is as simple as informing new users what ā€œcultivatedā€ meansā€¦ itā€™s easy to say ā€œcome on, this is obviously plantedā€, but itā€™s not obvious to everyone.

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Once again, I want to clarify that Iā€™m not talking about the gray areas. Also, I do find the cases where there is little dispute to be an issue and Iā€™m tired of pretending that these arenā€™t an issue. Iā€™ve ran into many instances where observers who donā€™t know what theyā€™re doing observe cultivated plants and follow-up with observations where you canā€™t tell (close-ups only). Yes, theyā€™re easy to curate, but they shouldnā€™t even be there in the first place and this practice of ignoring them with a quick ā€œxā€ 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.

This isnā€™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. Iā€™m the main person curating Euphorbia. I donā€™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 ā€œhelpfulā€ in the ideal sense and what is ā€œpracticalā€ for actually addressing the issues.

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