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

[upupa-epops]

@meurkc

But if we are to be taken seriously as a science/research and discovery platform, we must stop the totally unscientific application of demeaning terms such as ‘casual’ and preventing research grade status through the mixing of 2 unrelated parameters (correct ID and origin).

This is really complicated because “Casual” grade is kind of a load-bearing part of the current labelling system and it would take a lot of work to untangle that.

@upupa-epops

The problem I see with dividing up Casual grade is that currently it performs two overlapping functions (which have already been discussed above):

1. to designate lower quality observations
2. to take the observation out of the Identify pool (a function shared with Research Grade).

If you split up Casual then you’d need to address both of those functions.

The staff evidently have some (understandable) concerns about the work that would be involved in doing that untangling:

@tiwane

Finally, a change this huge (basically updating all data quality grades and how those work throughout the site) would cause a lot of confusion without a major benefit. The data quality system is already confusing. More granularly identifying garden plants or getting observations identified beyond species are not major needs for iNaturalist.

(I’m not entirely clear on what the difference is between those two feature requests and why Tony closed one and not the other)

(Edit: oh, it’s because the latter feature request wanted to make RG obs be Needs ID too, to encourage subspecies IDs, which I agree is excessive. The part applying to Casual obs is relevant here though.)