This is a good point. I know that in regions where I am not familiar with the local flora (wild or otherwise), my ability to judge whether something is likely planted is significantly reduced.
There are often some clues (ornamental, tidy flowers close to a building are typically cultivated, whereas unkempt and less showy ones growing in odd places are much less likely to be), but sometimes it isn’t easy to tell without more context. (This is one reason I appreciate it when users include a slightly more distant view in which we can see where the plant is growing for anything observed near human habitation.)
But a fair portion of observations by new users are obviously almost certain to be cultivated – they are growing in planters or pots, often even with a tag, or they are trimmed bushes or street trees with a protective ring around them. Here I think that some basic guidance that helps them think about what sort of things people plant and what things they don’t would probably allow many of these observations to be marked correctly in the first place.
(I do generally try to pay a bit of attention to whose observations I am IDing and whether they are an experienced user or someone new who might need a bit more guidance, precisely to avoid the sort of situation you experienced where people are explaining things that you already know – or rather, not providing the sorts of explanations that you would find relevant. But inevitably we all overlook things or misjudge the situation now and again. Here, too, it would probably be valuable to be able to refer people to good, non-judgmental guidance that applies regardless of the user’s background (e.g., “these are some criteria that can help to decide whether a plant is wild or cultivated”).)
I appreciate the perspective. In some ways, I feel this proves the point that we need better onboarding and tutorials. If those users linked you to a tutorial that gave you some tips on distinguishing cultivated from non-cultivated, would you look at it? If you saw something when you started iNaturalist that you knew you could return to, would that have helped? Would you be more or less likely to investigate further if you knew that it was important to our community? These are the things that we should really work towards figuring out.
Right. I’ve had many times where I truly believe a plant is wild and it’s pointed out to me that something contextual suggests it’s planted. If I don’t know the plant or am unfamiliar with the area, it’s not always obvious or clear at all. If I’m unsure if it’s captive or not, I typically err on the side of caution (for my own benefit, boo selfish, I guess) and won’t mark it as being captive.
Add accurate content and take community feedback into account. Any account that adds content we believe decreases the accuracy of iNaturalist data may be suspended, particularly if that account behaves like a machine, e.g. adds a lot of content very quickly and does not respond to comments and messages.
I think it’s reasonable to consider suspension if someone is clearly made aware of what to do when it comes to marking things wild/not-wild but continues to not do so.
Unfortunately I agree with @duncanross and I suspect the vast majority of people would not watch a video like this and I think onboarding in general is not as efficacious as we’d like it to be.
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.
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…”
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)”
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).
I think that, as things stand now, the vast majority of users are not likely to find the existing material in the first place, much less engage with it.
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. Generally people who are actively looking for something are already committed enough to be thinking about questions like how to improve their observations. Onboarding guidance needs to be low-threshold enough to also reach the users who are just trying out iNat. (edit – I guess the “getting started” pages are also linked on the right side of the dashboard, which is better than nothing, but this is also far enough down the page that it is easily overlooked and the simple text does not necessarily invite curiosity to click on it.)
Even if not everyone (and not even most people) will watch a video or use a tutorial, seeing that one exists on a particular topic at least raises awareness that this is something they can choose to learn more about.
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. Since – 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.
You know what bugs me? Identifiers who complain that they ask observers if the plant is cultivated or wild and the observer never responds so the observation waits there in Needs ID. Of course the observers aren’t going to respond. They almost never do. So just mark the questionable plant “cultivated” and leave the question with a request for comment and an offer to change the marking if appropriate. If the observer responds (unlikely), deal with that. Don’t leave the observation hanging for somebody else to deal with.
I should have been more clear. My apologies. Hopefully this is clearer: It’s not obvious from the community guidelines that users who don’t mark their cultivated plants as cultivated (even those repeatedly doing so and those that don’t respond to comments) are violating the guidelines. Whenever I’ve read the guidelines, I never really perceived that way.
As far as I can see, this interpretation of the guidelines hinges on two parts:
“Captive / cultivated organisms. We’d prefer they get marked correctly in the Data Quality Assessment, but they’re not intrinsically bad.” The language on this is so weak that I’m not sure I’d ever take it seriously if I were in the shoes of the observer being called out for not marking their observation as cultivated.
“Add accurate content and take community feedback into account. Any account that adds content we believe decreases the accuracy of iNaturalist data may be suspended, particularly if that account behaves like a machine, e.g. adds a lot of content very quickly and does not respond to comments and messages.” This is a useful reading of this statement, but not one that is at all obvious, especially in the context of the first statement that specifically addresses the problem of captive/cultivated organisms.
If this were clearer from the guidelines, that would be super helpful for me. Even just knowing that’s a possibility should make it easier to start these discussions about the importance of marking captive/cultivated with users.
This is exactly the kind of information I was looking for. Thanks! Is iNaturalist Next likely to replace the existing app?
Or maybe – I am brainstorming here – I don’t know, something like weekly tips the top of sidebar or as a (dismissable) banner on the homepage, either customized for new users or iNat-wide (because experienced users can learn things too).
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 (say, one week a topic like “how to photograph mushrooms” or “easy techniques to improve audio recordings”; another week “how to decide if this plant is wild” or “what ID should I enter?”)
(I am not primarily an app user and the one I do use is the android app which will be outdated at some point anyway, so I don’t have any idea about what strategies would make sense for integrating guidance into the app interface.)
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.
But let me say few words on the “new users”. I think that for many of them concepts like iNat as a global geodatabase for observations of wild organisms, the importance of marking the observations of non wild ones and also what “wild” and “captive/cultivated” in a strictly scientific language mean are far from being easily understandable.
Moreover, if most new users come to know for the first time iNat from the Google Play website/app, what should they think iNat really is? 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. Should I blame that user?
There is also possibly (possibly or for sure?) the issue that comments made from the website are not instantly seen in the app. As regards, few days ago I tried to make a user, who was making a “quickfire” high number of obs from a botanical garden, notice that the subjects of his obs were all cultivated. Of course that user remained unresponsible and continued doing the same.
In the end, I am 100% agreeing with you on the fact that this way is frustrating. But I consider much more frustrating when other users, maybe sometimes also experienced (in terms of number of obs/time since creating the account), start those bioblitzes/projects in which the involved users are clearly totally unaware of how to properly use iNat and possibly also what iNat is.
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.
Which is then compounded by either not knowing they should mark as cultivated or that is considered not wild. The large number of unmarked cultivated plants compared to other taxa highlights this reasoning as horticultural plants are prevelant and people want to know what they are.
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.
People tend to follow directions if given an alternative rather than simply being told not to.
I think any tutorial/help/how to improve observations should address this. Are there any known plans of this for the future?
I agree. 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.
Apart this, I think we should go on trying to make users understand. When I mark obs and see what has been previously posted by such users I often see many obs depicting cultivated plants left unmarked. So, in some cases, I end up thinking that no one has already tried to send a comment in their obs.
That is honestly terrifying to me. I’m not even sure it’s possible by any means to educate away a divide that vast. It almost makes me wish there was a category beyond casual and not casual where we had observations of users who really don’t know what they’re doing.
Never thought I’d say this, but I think that might be a good option temporarily. Long term, I think it would be better if those users never had the ability to make that mistake in the first place. I can think of a wide range of on-boarding strategies that would address this. I know it sounds bad, but I don’t think it would be a bad idea to make it harder for new users to join iNaturalist if this situation is common.
That’s not quite fair. The “…” is to abide by the community guidelines. Is it such a ridiculous thing to try to find and recommend better ways of requiring users to abide by the community guidelines?
Evidence of this comes from a recent situation where it seemed like not all curators believe that marking cultivated plants as cultivated is an important part of keeping with the community guidelines. Further, I was not able to defend this because I could not find any clear language stating that you shouldn’t leave cultivated plants unmarked as cultivated.
