Captive/Cultivated is Not Just a Waste Bin

As someone who occasionally does ID of captive/cultivated observations, I’ve noticed that a lot of “junk” observations such as photos of photos, photos that do not include evidence of organisms, or photos of Humans are often marked as captive/cultivated when this is not correct. This is a PSA to say please, do not mark these as captive. That’s what the DQA votes for “Evidence of Organism” or “Date is Accurate” are for. If the photo is of a Human, just ID it as Human and move on, please don’t mark it as captive unless the subject happens to be a prisoner or hostage. Marking all of these waste observations as captive can make trying to ID legitimate captive/cultivated observations a nightmare.

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Perhaps there should be a status like (but separate from) “research grade” for captive/cultivated observations that have multiple concurring IDs.

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This is likely because it takes just a single keystroke to mark something captive, and to do any of the other options takes manipulating a mouse and clicking things to basically get the same result. It takes a lot more time.

I think if the DQA options were a lot easier to perform, they would be used more.

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Yes I agree, it is because the X hot key in identify modal is so easy to use, people use it for observations where it doesn’t apply.

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Oftentimes there is a standing flag but it gets voted not wild anyway. Even so there’s no reason people should be marking observations of Humans as captive. Just add your ID of Human and move on.

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What exactly are you referring to here? There is some helpful info here, but I’m not sure it’s relevant:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#spam

I think duplicates are usually flagged.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/create-a-flag-category-for-duplicate-observations/29647

I also see curators flag much more frequently.

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-10-new-hot-keys-to-the-identify-page/3122

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Many use DQA, but the part about “evidence of organism”, not captive, as things are not captive.

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I don’t think there’s anything explicitly forbidding that, but doing so seems to be pretty blatantly misusing the site.

No, just cross-referencing.

Not sure what “valid” means but it’s technically discouraged in the flag prompt. The community guidelines say:

Duplicate observations. They’re not ideal, but they’re usually due to oversight or bugs. Politely ask people to remove them but if they don’t, it’s not a big deal unless it becomes a habit.

The curator guidelines state that flags for duplicates are generally left unresolved, so maybe that is permitting them (which seems inconsistent with the flag prompt). But the guidelines are easily changed by any curator so it’s not always the best to trust the exact wording too much.

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I’ve always been a bit confused by duplicates.
It would be good to have the policy clarified.

I usually comment, but if I do mark them in some way then I do so with DQA (but not captive/cultivated option I think).

I prefer DQA as I think treating flags as a waste bin is more problematic than adding to casual obs.
Also it seems less aggressive for new users.

Ideally though, duplicates need a dedicated solution.

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Welcome to the Forum!

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@tiwane said at least once that marking DQA that doesn’t fit observation shouldn’t happen, so answer to your question is no, it’s not ok to mark date incorrect or captive if observation is a duplicate.

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Flagging also makes observations casual, which is often why users take that route.

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But it also creates excessive flags that imo diffuse curators’ attention and can leave flags that need resolving with no action.

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Maybe. It’s fairly easy to filter for different types of flags, and certain curators tend to look at different types. It would only be an issue if a curator was only looking at their dashboard widget, in which case they’d miss most flags anyway.

But I do think a DQA vote would be more fitting. A side point for the above topic though.

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But most humans are “cultivated” no? XD I think wild humans are a bit rare.

Agree that joke/ trash posts shouldn’t be automatically categorized as cultivated, but it makes sense that most of them would be, for example anything manmade. For example a toilet; we couldn’t possibly call that wild right?

But stuff like a mountain picture should be classified wild but still marked as bad evidence of organism

" a lot more time" – is this not equivalent to standing in front of the microwave, muttering “Hurry up!” ?
What a ridiculous society we have become…

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The curator guidelines say the only time you should mark humans as captive/cultivated is for prisoners or hostages. Any other is wild.

Similarly, a human artifact such as a toilet is in the same situation. It is evidence of a wild organism, therefore the correct course of action is to ID it as Human, not mark it as captive. Believe it or not the toilet actually is wild.

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I agree with the original post and think this is another example of a disconnect between intended purpose (making it possible to filter for captive observations, e.g. for IDs) and unrelated goal (removing “junk” from Needs ID by making it casual).

Intended purpose (I assume): It is possible in ID mode to filter for captive/cultivated observations. It will then exclude other “casual” observations such as those without pics/locations, or things that don’t show evidence of organism. This is a useful feature for those who go through captive observations for IDs. Yes, a lot of those can be identified - e.g. for plants just grab a gardening catalog for your area or a book on common houseplants to help with IDs.

However, if things like jokes, man-made objects, blurry pics, whatever are marked “captive” it dilutes what could be a useful way of narrowing down the casual observations to those that could be further identified.

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I guess I don’t understand what you mean by that. Like I said, marking something captive requires just one keystroke, and all the other DQA actions take manipulating a mouse, and clicking at least three things to perform the action, then get back to where I was initially.

And in the end, both actions end up giving the observation an equivalent status, so why would people use the more time consuming method?

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If they cared about website, they would spend 3 secs more to mark it correctly.

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