I don’t think it’s accurate to say that
to people posting old photos that don’t represent their experiences as a general situation. Many of the potential downsides have been covered in other threads, and a few off the top of my head:
- For observations where the observer was not present/the observation wasn’t their experience, they are more likely to enter incorrect data. The date/location data will be based on hearsay, notes, or inference, all of which have a greater potential to be incorrect than for observations that an observer makes based on their own experience. Broadly, it’s often the case that an incorrect data point has a larger negative impact than a positive one has a positive impact.
- Additionally, since the “observer” (uploader?, can we even call them “observer”) was not present, they are less likely to be able to respond meaningfully to some types of questions or feedback from the community about the observation.
- More broadly, posting photos that are experiences of other people (and not one’s own) breaks the definition of the fundamental unit of iNaturalist, the observation, which records an individual’s encounter at a specific time/place with an organism. iNat’s documentation for observations talks about what “you saw” and what “you observed”. When users make use of iNat data, they are working under the assumption that the observer had that interaction themselves. This is what the observer field in the data means, both on iNat and when exported to GBIF.
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000169927-what-is-an-observation-
https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000192921-how-to-make-an-observation - Copyright/licensing becomes complicated when concerning images taken by others. Most iNat users don’t fully understand how they are often claiming rights/providing a license to photos that they post. Allowing/encouraging the use of photos taken by others and that aren’t of the observer’s experience opens the door to allowing posting of images taken by others in situations that cause even more of an issue (ie, “my friend took this photo”, “I found this photo in a library with a year and location on the back”) by complicating the rules/guidelines around this.
- A more minor point, but one that has come up before, is that old photos, including family photos, also fall afoul of iNat’s requirement that observations have recent evidence (see the DQA field). This DQA field is available at least in part to provide an easy way to downvote observations with evidence outside the lifespan of individual humans, as this isn’t primarily what iNat is for.
Adding these complicating factors means that dealing with observations like this could consume a disproportionate amount of staff/volunteer time, making the cost of dealing with the issues that they raise not worth the potential benefit.
Now, there is certainly a reasonable discussion as to whether those downsides (and any others I didn’t remember to mention) outweigh the benefits, but the costs are definitely present.
I think the current approach is a reasonable one - to essentially allow, but not promote, very limited posting of observations like this, but discourage large scale additions. This is more or less akin to how many laws that are “on the books” are used. For instance, in the US, it is illegal to possess feathers of native birds in most circumstances. There are good reasons for this law to exist. But I am sure USFWS (though I’m not an employee) knows that tons of people collect feathers they find on the ground while out in the world and possess them for longer or shorter periods. Yet they don’t have staff going around trying to find/arrest these people and enforce the law. It’s not worth it to enforce the law against someone with a few feathers, where the cost of enforcement would not outweigh its benefit (there’s little harm to an ecosystem that would be stopped, etc.) Enforcement happens fairly rarely and in situations where someone is killing/harming birds to harvest feathers or contributing to that trade. In a similar way, iNat can say “don’t upload observations that aren’t your own” but not enforce any action against small amounts of observations that go against this in cases where the downsides aren’t serious.
I also don’t think it’s accurate to say that
As GBIF notes in the quote you provided, users can
There are clearly other options outside of iNat where these observations could be published (observation.org would take these I think, etc).