They are annoying and intrusive, and furthermore no one pays attention to them. Most apps have multiple annoying screens that pop up and everyone just clicks them away. Implementing them on iNat will annoy people but i doubt it would help with this at all.
That’s just humans. It’s a huge site now and there’s no real way to fix it. You can create a collection project just for users you trust and use that for more detailed mapping and such. Most observations of less common species come from a few power users anyway.
I get this. I used to argue with admins about this back when the site was tiny, and of course as just some internet rando that carried no weight. I thought we could keep higher data quality standards. But we can’t. It’s the cost of this site getting so big. But if it hadn’t, i doubt it would have retained funding. It wouldn’t exist now at all. So it’s kind of a problem with no solution. I’ve just come to peace with it. It’s part of why I am so bothered by taxonomy stuff… the site is just as ocial media site to connect people with nature, except that people are adding really cryptic species and constnatly changing taxonomy which just isn’t compattable with a broad audience. Really iNat is a victim of it’s own success and is trying to be multiple things at once. I could see value of an ‘academic mode’ that was much more rigorous where users could choose to stay in that mode if they wanted everything held to higher standards. But to be honest, i wouldn’t use it beacuse i’m assuming ‘academic taxonomy’ would come with it.
So basically now i focus on how it is useful for my data and data of colleagues who also use it. I don’t worry about piles of bad data beacuse… i can’t worry about it, because there’s no hope to fix it. I just want to be left alone to use the site and don’t want the taxonomy in constant upheval.
Why is this a bad thing? Isn’t that what they SHOULD do? Would the site even exist if they hadn’t?
I guess i wonder if iNat is still for me too, but for somewhat different reasons. I feel like it would be nice if the admins put more work into making the site more usable for a broad audience instead of choosing one or the other, or trying to split the difference in ways that don’t work (hyper-split and super modernized taxonomy but no data quality for the observations themselves, and the confusion between taxonomic curators and site mods)
To be honest i feel like a huge proportion of the problem comes from ‘duress’ student users. I think instead of a broad probationary period, creation and enforcement of student accounts (based on having assignments to hse the site, not based on age) would help a lot. But again… this stuff hasn’t been a focus of the admins for years.
Charlie, I think you’re right about student accounts being a large part of the problem. My impression of new users who aren’t students is that either they figure things out fairly quickly, or they give up and go away quickly.
So if we want to help educators do a better job with student accounts, how do we do that? And by we here, I mean the whole iNat community and staff. There’s already a guide for educators, but obviously many educators don’t read it or don’t follow the instructions or can’t figure it out themselves. We identifiers can usually identify student observations, but often there is no way to connect an individual student back to the teacher, or even to a project. I have sometimes left messages on individual observations, when it’s obvious a whole class is out on campus at the same time, for the observer/student to tell their teacher to tell the whole class to remember to give an initial ID upon uploading, to mark garden plants as cultivated, not to take photos of humans/trash/rocks, and so on, but I haven’t seen any positive effect.
How do we get to the educators? Write letters to the editors of science education journals? Find out what organizations there are for science educators and write them? Protest in front of our local university science center with signs saying, “Understand how iNaturalist works before you assign it!”?
It’s a hard question without easy answers, but maybe the ability for people to flag accounts as student accounts with data quality assessment? However, I could see that getting abused badly. Maybe make you choose a student account vs regular account upon account creation. Offer some additional student account features like a pre-created project or student and teacher roles, and allow an optional ‘graduation’ for anyone who wants to convert their account from student to regular after the class is done. Maybe ask that they watch or read an orientation before doing that. Of course there are also issues to this approach, for instance what if someone already has an account then is asked to participate in a class using iNat, do we make them use a separate account or convert theirs back to ‘student’ ?
In terms of making educators listen and actually follow the rules, i don’t know. It’s distressing that some in a job known for imposing rules on others don’t seem able to follow them themselves. And yes i know there are many great teachers who use iNat well, but those teachers aren’t ignoring their students adding of problematic observations to the site.
Yes! Getting hold of the teacher could solve much of this. Often somebody here could figure out the school involved. I wonder if somebody here should attempt to get to the teacher, either through the school or by flat-out asking the students. If so, who should do this? (I doubt iNaturalist wants just everybody pestering teachers, perhaps impolitely, but staff certainly doesn’t have enough time.)
As far as Italy is concerned, maybe most casual (not wild) observations come from tourists who apparently cannot do without photographing all the ornamental/cultivated plants in gardens, city/hotel green spaces, orchards and so on.
You can leave comments in their obs trying to make them stop for a while and reason but usually as long as they stay in Rome/Florence/Venice/Amalfi they go on doing the same.
Yes but I am much more concerned in the cases of bioblitzes/CNC. In the case of a class visiting a green space maybe one to ten obs per student are posted for a total of ca. 50-200 obs. With bioblitzes/CNC there are usually thousands observations, often with very high percentages of nonsense cultivated plants because some participants, either young or not, feel the need to make the highest number of obs. And often the organizers disappear after the event has finished and remain dormant for the rest of the year until the next event but leaving all the mess behind still to be fixed.
The problem for me is twofold. First, if you tell new users not to submit things “that look planted”, you run the risk of having them dismiss even weeds and naturalized plants that can be useful records. Secondly, it’s not always intuitive to people what is a weed and what isn’t, if they aren’t inherently very familiar with plants in general.
It seems difficult to balance this. Either too many captive observations are uploaded, or potentially too few wild observations are uploaded, in these circumstances.
It’s this reason that I do wish iNaturalist had an alternative “research grade” category for planted and captive stuff, so that this whole complete dismissal of non-wild stuff was never an issue from the start.
I agree. Many of the problems with captive/cultivated organisms, including a reluctance on our parts to mark them as such if they aren’t identified, are self-inflicted wounds by iNaturalist, resulting from their failing to deal with cultivated organisms as different from trash.
yeah to be honest i am actually not a big fan of CNC or big bioblitzes as they occur now. Maybe they need a different account type too. But i recognize that isn’t just an answer for everything.
I agree. There’s a lot of value in this. Allowing multi-person observations, like linking several accounts to one observation, could help too like getting students out in teams. But the problem is even if that functionality existed it would be more advanced and complicated than most of these sorts of users would be likely to try.
It is critically important to distinguish between wild and cultivated etc. 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). As i’ve argued there are many deliberate and totally scientific purposes for recording cultivated species - as hosts of wild organisms, biosecurity issues, monitoring habitat restoration projects etc cheers c
I haven’t read most of this thread, because frankly, it seems like another variation of the same gripes and disagreements that have been had many times. Those get tedious. The fact that the thread has gone on so long… well, as per the directive to assume that people mean well, I’ll take it as a sign of just how deeply we all care about iNaturalist and want it to be a positive thing.
The question is, are we getting anywhere with this discussion, or is it just a venting session?
I think people operate under the assumption iNat admin may make changes to what they are doing based on the discussions here. Sometimes that is true and sometimes that isn’t. When it isn’t, these discussions do become pretty pointless in terms of enacting policy. But that’s also just kind of the point of the forum and it’s easy to ignore threads about the eternal wild/cultivated question if you don’t like them. New users will keep coming in and asking and this forum is already too heavy handed with deletion and closing of posts in my opinion, upping that isn’t going to make it a better place.
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.
The staff evidently have some (understandable) concerns about the work that would be involved in doing that untangling:
(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.)
yes, the core problem here is that the iNat admins as well as most power users don’t want to prioritize cultivated observations, but many (most?) casual users do. It seems like just allowing them to reach research grade tagged as captive but also nudging new users towards wild species might be a better solution than the current one to just make it annoying to observe captive things until users leave after submitting a bunch of data that the system doesn’t handle well.
I meant a probationary period during which they could only upload a limited number of observations (five a day? 10 a day?). The benefit of graduating from the probationary period is that you have no limit on the number of observations you can upload per day. This limitation means that there are fewer observations to look at and even weak identifiers like me can tell them if they are posting captive/cultivated and what to do about that, AND if they are posting something as Unknown that can easily be designated as an animal or a plant or a mammal or a bird, etc. AND that they should also fill in the annotations, etc. All the really basic things that I learned by fumbling around and (when I finally discovered it) reading the forum, because the one tutorial that I watched was all about traveling somewhere with a pricey camera with a GPS and making observations in some park, etc., when I was just taking photos of the stuff in my backyard with my phone.
The probationary period would also put a damper on the floods of observations from teachers requiring their students to make a certain (larger) number of observations, yet not adequately educating them about how one makes observations or even reviewing the observations that they make. I’m not in favor of making teachers jobs harder, but I have read the (many) complaints on the forum about floods of observations with various problems (shades of Gerald the muskrat) that pop up on iNat from classes.
I imagine the probationary period as a comparatively short period of time, but it could simply be until the observer submits a certain number of observations within the parameters. This process of educating new observers is happening already when identifiers like me put education comments on observations. Ex., this looks like a cultivated plant (the pot often gives it away) so perhaps you would have better luck with an identification if you posted it on PlantNet. Etc.
Question: those users who post a few times and then disappear (not counting duress users) – do they tend to post more than five or 10 observations in that short time? The relevance of the question has to do with encouraging vs. discouraging new users to stay; that is, would a probationary period affect the likelihood of their staying?