i think it’s important to distinguish user-selected obscuring from auto-obscuring here, they are very different and usually have different goals and purposes.
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As Charlie said, this is not about User-obscuring, its about the Auto-obscuring. If a user wants their info hidden that’s their prerogative and no-one can gainsay that.
I’m concerned about the conservation applications and the value of iNat as a conservation tool.
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The last few posts seem to have veered off topic a bit. I think the advantages and disadvantages of auto obscuration are certainly a legitimate topic and I would love to hear the thoughts from all those directly involved in conservation. There will always be a push and pull over it, and I’m not sure any solution will be perfect, but it’s a good ongoing discussion to have, maybe in General.
@earthknight your latest suggestion seems to be a change from your original post that created this topic - do you want to amend the original post and title to reflect that?
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Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think it’s veered off at all. The bulk addition aspect is still front and center, but others pulled it into a different direction. That’s fine, as conversations do that, but I’d like it to stay with the bulk addition problem.
Given that it was asked so often in the old Google Groups format it seems that there is wide-spread desire for this feature amongst iNat users.
@earthknight The quoted post definitely veers from the topic as started… and the following “advice” is offered even if you don’t appreciate our efforts to help you:
Collection project to pick up the bulk of observations in the area, and a traditional project to manually add the ones you think should be included. Then an umbrella project to show the results of both (pretty sure this works, although I haven’t personally tested it)
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I appreciate the efforts @kiwifergus, but the suggestion made there (similar to one made on a different thread) is an extremely clunky and clumsy work around. There are far more elegant solutions, as have been discussed.
The bit you quote from me was my response to a comment made, not a suggestion in and of itself and certainly not a change of subject. It’s not off topic either as it provides one potential work-around for the problem, given that there seems to be a bit of an institutional unwillingness to seriously consider recommendations that users have made multiple times (as was demonstrated by the links to Google Group discussions on the Bulk Add topic).
That’s fine as admins and iNat staff have to make a lot of tough decisions, and as iNat grows the nature and origin of those pressures changes and grows too, but I do think it’s important to remember that at its root this is a user driven community.
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No it is not, there is a valid debate to be had about what should be obscured, which I fully support and believe that too many things are needlessly obscured.
However, if something is obscured, through either automatic means or user choice, then the behaviour of the site should be consistent, obscured means obscured. If something is obscured, there should be no backdoor to allow users to override that.
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I disagree… strongly. You can accomplish this by making a collection project AND a traditional project, and then having an umbrella project to aggregate them. It works BTW, I tested it, and it is not clunky, in fact it is ideal because it compartmentalises the auto adds vs the manual adds. And if there are more elegant solutions, then perhaps a link to those, rather than a vague “your idea is dumb, I’ve heard better”…?
It is also a different issue to the title of the feature request. It’s starting to feel a bit like “well, if I cant have that, then I want this”
Who were you responding to? It is the first mention of anything to do with asking if an uploader wants their observation added to projects. A terrible idea, and if it ever gets implemented it better have an option to disable it! It is substantially inconsistant with the title of this feature request, and very much off-topic. If this were a general discussion it would matter less!
I vote close and/or move to general…
Odd, I’m now not seeing the post I made that reply to. It’s possible that it was in response to a comment on a different thread and I inadvertently switched windows.
EDIT: That response though, the knee-jerk:
A terrible idea, and if it ever gets implemented it better have an option to disable it!
Is emblematic of the difficulties here. Rather than actually consider anything the default response I’ve seen on a number of threads seems to be more one of “No” rather than one of ,“Hmm, let’s think about that.”
To my mind that’s somewhat against the whole “community/citizen” based principle of this platform.
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The exclusuion of certain records which are obscured from collection projects is not a bug, not an oversight, not a mistake, it is a thought through intentional design choice.
You keep coming back to collection projects need a bulk or manual add option. As Tony Iwane and others have tried to explain, manually adding specific records, or bulk adding (for any reason be they excluded by obscuring, you just want that one bug record because the bug is on a plant your project covers or whatever other reason) is technologically not possible with the design of collection projects.
If you believe that design choice is wrong, fine, that’s your right to hold and communicate. But please either frame the request (and do a feature request) that will get you want you believe is appropriate. That being either:
- says throw out collection projects, start from scratch and include the ability to add records manually and which somehow accomodates the same user permission model that exists in traditional projects.
- or remove the obscuring system (if that is across the board, for project owners, for curators, for people who work in certain fields, for anyone whose user name is a Star Wars character - unless it is Jarjarbinks, because they clearly cant be trusted(apologies if there is a user with that name) , or even just you - whatever, as this makes the first option moot.
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I don’t know if it encapsulates everything, but there’s this thread.
I disagree, because self obscured things, the user is the one who chooses who can see it. I’m not sure adding people to a trusted list or whatever should reveal auto obscured things. It’s a huge loophole because let’s face it, can’t a poacher just make friends with someone and convince them to add to a ‘trust’ list? I think very few things should be auto obscured - only things with a collection or poaching or harassment list - but when they are obscured, they need to be obscurd to pretty much everyone. I understand it makes sense to let a few conservation organizations access the data but even that… has its issues. I don’t know the answer because i can see both sides of this, it really does break projects when all obscured things get bumped out, but creating loopholes to geoprivacy defeats the point entirely. I know this keep sverring off topic but in a way it isn’t. People only care about this because of the obscured observations. Maybe the actual answer is we shouldn’t be obscuring species that the local community and conservation program doesn’t think should be obscured, though that is dangerous because some conservation groups turn that around and ask to obscure everything to everyone except themselves. or at least the obscuring needs to work a little better, though i don’t know how that would be.
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If as is the case now with tradional projects, the site allows users to designate that they trust with their obscured locations the curators of that project, I’m not really sure it makes a difference if the user is also allowed to designate people they trust with their observations outside of a project context. It’s two different ways of doing the same thing, or alternatively two different ways someone can get duped.
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to be honest it seems like the sort of system poachers can potentially game but small scale conservation organizations, activists, and naturalists won’t have the time or motivation to penetrate. Which is the worst of both worlds.
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What I am saying is I see no reason to have one but not the other. The site should either allow users to designate users they trust to see their sightings (if that is in the context of projects or otherwise), or they should not allow it at all and enforce that obscured means obscured under all circumstances.
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I’d love to see the “add to project” section in Identify mode, but I would also love an option to batch add other people’s observations to a project. I’m not sure how often my situation happens, but this is the reason: Here in Hong Kong, we have a traditional (I think…) project Hong Kong Moths (& moths on this list tend to get more attention / get IDed more quickly). For the CNC, I have a bunch of new iNat users on my campus who have been doing “moth safaris” and posting their observations. It’s a steep learning curve for them at first and I don’t want to also as them to figure out “projects” and ask them to add all moth observations to the Hong Kong Moths list. So, I’m doing it for them, but it’s click-consuming. It would be super if I could search for all the “butterflies and moths” in another user’s observations, select all of the non-butterflies, and add them in one go.
Also, a pony, please! Many thanks. :)
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I have an example that I think would work best with being able to bulk add my observations to a project. I’m thinking of it as a ‘club’ where everyone is adding their observations to a project. This way, people in our community can see/meet others who are on iNaturalist and doing interesting work. It also serves as a way for us to track who is using this skill/tool when they leave from our programs and return home.
In trying this out, I’ve created the project and now I want to add all of my observations to the project (200+), but there doesn’t seem an option to do this.
Any other ideas of what features would work to create this ‘club’-like/community collaboration or is bulk adding your own observations to the same project the best way to go about this? (if bulk adding existed…)
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It depends on what kind of project it is. If it is a new collection project, then no, as records are not technically added to a project (there is no way to even add a single record).
If it is an old style project, you can bulk add your records (and only your records) via the ‘Add from Your Observations’ link which appears towards the bottom right of the project home page.
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I would suggest just making a collection project and use a place and usernames as the parameters. Then you’d be able to add the usernames of anyone who wanted to join and they could all easily see what each person has contributed.
If getting true locations of obscured observations is not really a big issue, I would suggest making a collection project that automatically includes all moths in Hong Kong. Here’s an example one I’ve made: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/hong-kong-moths-example
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This is my reason for wanting a bulk add to projects:
I have a traditional project - https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/pillar-parade-s-afr - for the Lepidoptera caterpillars of southern Africa.
If everyone annotated their obs with Insect Life Stage: larva, then it would be a cinch to convert to a collection project. But very few people do, and newcomers never do. Also, some obs have more than one life stage, so they can’t be annotated at all.
So, what I have to do is go through all the unannotated lepi obs on the Identify page, and annotate them one by one. Laborious. Then I have to go to the Explore page and search for all lepis with annotation larva not in the project. Then open each observation separately to add to the project. Desperately tedious. Luckily there are several people who add caterpillar obs to the project when they review them.
If we can at least add to projects on the Annotations tab in Identify, this will go a long way to speeding up the process. And a batch add to project would be even better :-)
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@karoopixie- I quoted this comment on another thread that you may be interested in https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/use-computer-vision-to-annotate-observations/3331