Four months back a user added an observation of a cicada which was obviously way out of range. I asked for clarification, to which there was no response and the user has since gone inactive. Perusing the other observations, it appears they are mostly mounted insects from a collection, some of which have cards with visible dates and locations which don’t match that of the iNaturalist records. All observations are suspect. Can such a user be flagged somehow so that all of their observations become casual?
How many observations they have? Is there too many to mark them all as date/location inaccurate?
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77 observations.
That’s not that many, you could just go through in Identify and DQA-vote them all Casual. I think users who post a bunch of low-quality obs generally don’t stick around long enough to be a problem (or they become more involved with the site and fix the observations themselves).
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Yeah, just do what fluffyinca suggested. If the user is inactive there literally isn’t anything else we can do.
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How? I see no obvious option in identify to do this easily. I already know how to go to each observation and downvote the dates and locations, which I care not to do. Do you mean flag as “other?”
Send username to iNat-help and somebody else will mark them so, there’s no reason to flag them.
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What’s the email for iNat-help?
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It’s quite simple, just go to the Data Quality tab in the identify modal, and press on the thumbs down. Then press the right arrow and you can do that for each observation.
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Ah yes. Thanks!
If you know they are completely wrong, you can mark them as ‘Human’ and they will never make it to research grade. It’s usually reserved for dumb stuff, but would work. Copyright infringement may also be involved here, if the photos were taken from the internet.
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Marking them as “date/location inaccurate” seems more appropriate in this instance, since the observations are of insects, not of a human/human-made object.
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Definitely don’t mark them as Human if they aren’t images of humans or human-made things. Location/date is best in this scenario.
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I more prefer notifying iNaturalist help about this. This account has many observations with incorrect data, but it would be difficult to make a determination of the accuracy of many others. I would hope that iNaturalist staff has a general recommendation on what normal users should do when coming upon such account. Is there such a recommendation? It seems doing something on level of the whole account is better than taking a large number of actions, one per observation.
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The only recommendation is to mark the Data Quality Assessment. A curator or staff could contact the user, but if they aren’t active, that won’t be effective.
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