Becoming an iNat curator

General
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Hey fellow iNaters :wave:! I’m hoping to eventually become a iNat curator. I know that in order to become a curator you have to have an account with iNat for at least 60 days, also have 100 improving identifications to anyone’s observations, plus you have to have made 5 iNat flags on observations.

Here’s my question:

I’ve only had to make 1 flag on an observation.
How can I find more observations to flag? Is that even possible?

All help will be much appreciated :smiling_face:.

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  1. Go thru Unknowns. You can use https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/placeholder-backup to see if - the reason why taxon name is a placeholder, is because missing sp needs to be added. For plants I was asked to add the POWO link, and the response is sometimes immediate. Thank you, curators. Most of my flags come from here.
  2. I suppose the intention is to prove you can help curate a taxon - so now is your chance to push ‘the problems you have seen’ at curators (let me sort this out in future?)
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It’s worth asking yourself why you’d like to be a curator. Generally, the point of being a curator is to be able to resolve flags. Adding flags shows that you have identified issues on the site that you could help resolve if you were a curator. Rather than trying to seek out opportunities to create flags, I’d suggest just using the site until you get to the point where you are noticing lots of things that you’d be able to fix as a curator. At that point, you may be ready to be one.

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How does one go about finding out how many flags one has created?

Nevermind, I found it here

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That’s what I did. I’m sure that I added far more than five flags before it crossed my mind to apply for curatorship.

Edit: Yes I did. 24 of them. Bear in mind that you can flag an observation for reasons that are not taxonomic. Several of my flags were for copyright infringement.

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Same exact thing happened to me last night. I flagged a observation for that reason.

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Ok thanks for the feedback everyone :smiley:.

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Tbh I don’t really care what you think about my profile and second of all I’m definitely not bringing religion discussion into the iNatForum.

I want to become a curator to help the iNat community out. Overall just help make iNat a great place by helping out in any way that’s possible.

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I love your reply bro.

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I’m not saying this with any disrespect towards the curators, but I am of the opinion that the best way that people can help out is not so much in the flags, but with ID’s.

One of the biggest complaints coming from observers is that it often takes too long to get an ID. Conversely, a complaint from the identifiers is that there aren’t enough identifiers. Two sets of metrics were published for how many people place ID’s on here, and generally it’s only a couple of thousand people placing the vast majority. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Summaries-of-identification-effort-on-iNaturalist-Panels-a-and-b-summarize_fig1_372310054
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/35758-we-ve-reached-1-000-000-observers

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As a person who mostly upload observations of bugs and birds, I still have obs that have been id-less for a year, and I bet other users have a similar problem. It makes sense, considering how many people are willing to study tiny spiders found in an obscure part of a forest in India as a hobby. Experts are few and far between ( although I plan on becoming one).

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I had submitted 200+ flags before my application for curator status and most of them was identifying insects that had not been identified on iNat before. That is how you come accross the need for a flag (adding taxa).
The other thing is taxonomic changes that come when new papers are published with genus revisions etc.

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Apparently it’s not a strict requirement - judging by the number of curators with zero and near-zero curatorial activity:
https://www.inaturalist.org/people

Not sure what’s behind this. (I also can’t figure how raising many flags would imply some competence with curating taxonomic schemes, but that’s me)

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Most of those curators were established before the role became strictly application-based, with actual requirements. It used to be that one curator could give the curator role to another user, without administrator privileges.

Although do note that page does not show how many flags you have raised, only the number you have resolved. It only shows the tasks that curators can do but normal users can’t.

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https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/remove-all-curators-and-start-from-scratch/140/12

Under Review back in Feb 2019

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But the problem of too few identifiers is not limited just to places like an obscure part of a forest in India. In some kingdoms, even widespread taxa have few identifiers – try getting a second ID on lichens, for example, even at the genus level.

I would be against removing all curators, but would consider supporting the removal of those who were made curators by other curators and have not done any curatorial work since.

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2 of the 4 suggestions were activated in Jan 2021.

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I don’t see how removing inactive curators would speed things up. I’m not against it, I just don’t think it would have any significant impact. On the whole, my requests for curation have been met promptly and efficiently. It’s identification that’s slow.

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Some activities that require curator status are also not shown in this list.
For example, I became a curator exclusively because I wanted to add conservation statuses. (Haven’t done it much recently due to uni, but I’m planning on getting back to it)
I have done some other stuff too that does show on the list if I felt like it, for example adding requested species in groups which I’m more familiar with, and resolving some minor user-flags, but I’m not planning on actively curating much there. At least not until I’ve learned enough to confidently address taxonomy stuff.

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