Captive/Cultivated is Not Just a Waste Bin

I believe that it is not Artificial Stupidity: it is True Stupidity. I had no idea that iNat had to accept these types of posts, or tolerate the humans that post them.

Inat don’t have to do anything, but the ID on this example is absolutely correct and the behavior of posting observations like this is essentially harmless as long as the volume from a particular person isn’t unreasonable and they aren’t adding obviously false/joke IDs. There are much bigger fish to fry…

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Actually, I see several individual organisms of Genus Pinus in that picture. But adding that ID would open a whole nother can of worms wouldn’t it/

I think that an important cause of this problem is that captive/cultivated observations become “casual” like those that lack photos or dates or have other errors. It’s easy for me to feel like casual = trash, and trash is trash, so does it really matter if something gets there by being labeled “captive/cultivated” when it’s not?

While it’s still mixed into the junk category, motivation to treat “captive/cultivated” with respect is hard to find. So we have another good reason to separate “captive/cultivated” from “casual”! Let’s add a category just for captive/cultivated observations, and have two levels within it, confirmed and needs ID! I think this will make the captive/cultivated more useful – and easier to label properly.

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And then there are the cultivated plants (already casual) that also have no media. Yes, I do take the trouble to mark “It’s as good as it can be.”

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Imo photos with correct location, but no date are more valuable than cultivated plants, anyway, casual bin should be separated and it’s unclear why it’s not done yet as with each year we get more data to sort out if it’s marked incorrectly.

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There is no logic to iNat putting Not Wild / Cultivated / Captive with the wasted obs lacking data and all the Humans / my pets / random pot plants.

We do need 3 categories, then we can set our default filters to suit us.

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The pot plants don’t bother me, either way. Such pretty leaves for a garden plant.
But many scientists have complained about endless pot plants that shouldn’t be on iNat.

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Perhaps ‘casual’ shouldn’t be such a broad category. I don’t think observations posted just for fun, observations with missing information (i.e. no date, location, or photo), and duplicates belong in the same category.

Maybe a third status could be introduced. A possible ‘junk’ category for unusable observations. Copyrighted media would also go into ‘junk’. Casual would remain the domain of pets, people, and cultivated plants and animals.

Observation of memes and other silly images could potentially go in junk ‘junk’ or ‘causal’.

It could help filter out observations which could be used if they were reviewed. This could also mean a revamp of the Data Quality Assessment questions.

If a system like this were to be introduced, I think the prioritization of observations should also change. Right now, iNat first favours ‘research grade’, then ‘needs ID’, then ‘casual’. With a new category, the order should change to ‘research grade’, ‘casual’, ‘needs ID’ and finally ‘junk’.

Casual observation are still useful but not for tracking wild populations. ‘Junk’ would be useful to no one. Same goes for ‘needs ID’ it’s in between ‘research grade’ and ‘casual’ but a observation with no ID from another user, can’t be used.

I would agree.

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On the website uploader it will give you a pop-up warning if you are missing anything–date, location, ID–and you have to click OK. On the app I know I’ve seen a warning about missing location, but I don’t think it cares whether you have an ID, and I have never experienced missing date.

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I think this topic should stick to the original idea – that people are using the captive/cultivated DQA incorrectly.

If you would like to discuss changing casual/needs ID specifically for captive/cultivated, there is already a feature request for that: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-captive-cultivated-not-automatically-no-id-needed/112
Please use that existing topic for further thoughts about observation flows.

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I am going through all observations of “captive” Salticidae and fixing what you mentioned.

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