Can iNaturalist please send a reminder to all members about need to mark their observations cutivated/captive v. wild? It’s literally a forum rule.
I have been seeing a lot of plant photos uploaded that are clearly in pots, in gardens, or otherwise easily identifiable as cultivated - but not marked as such. There are also times where I’m about 80% sure a plant is cultivated, but I can’t tell from the photo, and it gets tiring asking the poster to address the issue. Example - most of the time I can bet that a zinnia or a dahlia in cold winter US states are cultivated, but I can’t always see confirmation in the photo. [EDIT: NOT ASKING FOR ADVICE]
It’s a serious concern in my view, as I am not sure that people understand that iNaturalist is not simply a way to identify plants, etc., but also a citizen science/research database, and data quality is important.
Seek is fine for identifying whatever plants or other things are around us, but Seek isn’t for data collection, per se. Seek does offer the ability to log into iNaturalist though, so I don’t know to what extent there is a lack of onboarding happening to help people learn the difference between the two platforms. [EDIT: NOT ASKING TO DEBATE THIS]
I know iNaturalist sends out periodic all-member updates and things - it would be really helpful to have a reminder about this sent around, with links or easy pointers to remind people of how to mark their own observations.
Thanks
EDITED to address people not responding to what I actually posted about.
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If you are not confident that a plant has been planted or cultivated, please just ask “Planted?”
Also, if a person states “escaped, waif, not planted” or anything similar, please do not mark it as captive/cultivated.
However, the majority of the time you see a plant that appears to be planted it most certainly is. Please downvote them as such(and in the rare chance someone lets you know it was an escapee then please upvote). I always mark plants as “Captive/Cultivated” but ask “Planted” for the gray area ones.
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As someone who IDs Araucaria, I mark a lot of them cultivated.
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ive seen a lot of araucaria around here, and they don’t have any elements of being planted.
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It’s mostly in India and the Philippines where I see cultivated ones, but I see them all over the world, as they’re a somewhat popular ornamental tree.
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I think it’s a great idea for a message like this to be sent out.
Also, I’m slightly confused by the replies on here so far. The original poster is clearly asking about a reminder message being sent out, not marking thing as cultivated nor best practices when communicating with users who don’t mark cultivated plants as cultivated.
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Robby used the term “waif”:
I didn’t know what a waif was. Here are some definitions that I found:
https://mexico.inaturalist.org/posts/106115-what-is-a-waif
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waif#Botany
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With regard to the original question, there is a constant tension in dealing with the public. The data quality purists would want everyone to almost complete a PhD on using iNaturalist. That would ensure the highest data quality, right? But it would have a huge negative impact on engagement.
The other approach is “the more, the merrier”. That is great for engagement, but it has terrible effects on data quality.
There is no perfect answer. City Nature Challenge staff, iNat staff, and everyone who deals with the public in any capacity . . . we are always trying to “thread the needle” by balancing education with engagement.
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THANK YOU
I too am confused by the responses. I’m literally just asking for a message to be sent around, as I said in my original post. The additional content I included in my “ask” was to provide a reason why, as someone was inevitably going to ask me why it is needed.
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this isn’t what I’m asking for. I’m literally asking iNat to send a message to all users to remind them to mark their observations properly.
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This isn’t what I posted about. Also, it is the primary responsibility of the original uploader to follow the rules and to properly label their observations. I am frequently ID’g on my phone, and do not have access to the full set of labels, and honestly, it’s exhausting doing other people’s work for them continuously when it is a rule of the community to label wild or captive/cultivated. Anyway, again, my post is asking for a REMINDER to be sent around.
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This is a persistent issue that will not be solved unless there is a required onboarding for users before they could interact fully with iNaturalist. No amount of commenting “@username I think this observation is of a [captive/cultivated/captured and kept/etc.] [type of organism]. I went to the Data Quality Assessment of this observation and marked this observation as not wild for the sake of preserving the quality of data. Please follow up if this [type of organism] is actually wild." and directly messaging them about the situation is going to make them stop.
I have long been a proponent of discarding the idea that iNaturalist should be a place for tracking one’s engagement with nature. If that was the main mission, we will inevitably have people not caring about quality at all and not bothering to do their due diligence to improve their observation skills (making a preliminary ID before posting, narrowing down the positional accuracy, making sure their dates are correct, adding annotations, adding observation fields, adding to projects, and filling out the DQA when it is needed). People can just save evidence files to their device(s), update the metadata, and add them to sub-directories in their file system without needing to post anything to the public.
Since onboarding feature requests are not up for consideration, this “reminder” cannot be done, and identifiers must remind people to mark the wildness of their observations and take time out of other tasks to do this.
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While I agree with your middle paragraph that iNaturalist isn’t the app for tracking engagement with nature (I think that is Seek, iNaturalist’s cousin), I disagree that the reminder can’t be sent without onboarding.
Maybe it’s just me, but I thought it was kind of clear that you have to label your stuff as wild/not wild(cultivated/captive). The reasoning was confusingly presented, but I got the gist. So it really aggravates me a lot and takes the fun out of improving observations when people repeatedly don’t follow the rules. Separate species in separate posts is a close second.
As a separate topic, and I’m opening to a direct message on iNat about this from you (as I’m still trying to understand this forum setup - this is my first post) as to why there is no required short onboarding tutorial for new users. I think that would help a lot, as would a clearer explanation of what iNat is for vs. Seek vs. identification apps.
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Onboarding is a difficult feature to implement in the back end because iNaturalist user permissions will have to be affected, and the current mission involves making it as easy as possible to engage with the platform. Anything restricting a person from uploading observations, commenting, or identifying beyond a quick account setup goes against the mission. The developers are also struggling with spaghetti code causing bugs, and they are necessarily higher priority than building new features like an additional tutorial people will forget to follow or click through just to start observing.
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Ah. I guess to me onboarding just means a tutorial video – like simple stuff, something to even explain annotations (organism, alive/dead, etc.) because I didn’t know those were a thing till another user pointed them out. I feel like right now, it’s a bit Wild West and making it easier to engage with the platform would kind of seem to include a little 101 video or something on rules, etiquette, and basics. But that’s just me I guess.
thanks for the info - appreciate it.
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We have a DQA for that - Not a Single Subject - which pushes the obs to Casual. Until the observer resolves the issue.
there is a link to https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/folders/151000552105 in the side column of our dashboard.
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I’m hoping the new iNaturalist Ambassador program will help address this problem. It’s one of the reasons I signed up to be an iNat Ambassador – to be part of an onboarding process that could help new users with data quality. The Ambassador program is still very new, and no one quite knows how it’s going to work out. But perhaps you might direct this suggestion to the Ambassador program – Alison Young is the staffer in charge of the program, her email address is “ambassadors” then the iNat domain – on iNat itself, she’s @kestrel
Along these lines, maybe you’ve seen the Forum thread “iNat or iNot” – https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inat-or-inot-a-quiz-to-check-understanding-of-captive-cultivated/39978 – you can actually link to her online quiz if you want! I’ve adapted her quiz for in-person presentations, and I believe this or something like it would be a great tool to include as part of a standard iNat Ambassador toolkit.
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These are usually new users who haven’t used the platform much and don’t know how it works. There are onboarding tutorials that explain these things, but if a user hasn’t bothered to look at those, I don’t know how much additional messaging will do. Might reach a few new users today, but the new users tomorrow won’t see it, and the problem will just continue. This is why the solution has to be mandatory onboarding for new accounts. The average new casual user who posts three observations of potted plants and then disappears isn’t going to be reached by a popup message with a paragraph about the meaning of “captive”. I’ve been active on the forum for years and post observations daily, and I freely admit that I ignore most of the banner notifications that pop up when I log in. I can’t imagine that someone who just downloaded the app to ID their house plant is going to spend the time to read through them, unless they’re required to to gain access to the ability to post.
“Argh, so many potted plants!” has been a refrain on the forum as long as there’s been a forum, and I’d be opposed to mass-messaging everyone on the platform as a solution. I think it would just be clutter that would only be read by the hardcore users who already know these things. We need a mandatory walkthrough-style tutorial for new accounts, like a video game intro, and I can’t see anything short of that having any measurable impact on the problem. As has been mentioned above though, the downside to implementing something like this (aside from the coding logistics) is that some would-be new users will undoubtedly just delete the app if they have to go through a tutorial to access its features. The process we have now I think is pretty reasonable. We’ve all been through it. I started using iNat by posting some plants around my garden, got scolded for posting cultivated stuff, complained for a bit, got over it, and learned how to do things right. Modern learning seems to use the FAAFO approach, not the “read the directions first” approach. If a mass message saying “mark garden plants as cultivated” had appeared when I first started using iNat, I would have responded with confusion and promptly dismissed it, figuring that whatever that meant, someone would tell me if I was doing it wrong.
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Where is “around here” ? The global natural distribution of the genus is quite limited - some Pacific Ocean islands, Australia, Brazil (A. angustifolia only) and Argentina and Chile (A. araucana only). Everywhere else they are found, they are either planted or naturalised from planted specimens.
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When all else fails, read the instructions.
Or, come to the iNat Forum.
