I am VERY glad to hear that there will be changes, but I admit I still have a lot of concerns.
It’s been nearly 8 months since the last CNC, and I am still dedicating almost 100% of my curator time to dealing with the falsified observations from those few days.
I hope that you will strongly emphasize the need for project organizers to dedicate time to cleaning up problem observation, and also teach them how to do it.
I’ve been reaching out to project organizers ever since CNC ended, requesting they help with this. Very few even responded, but those who did respond clearly did not have the faintest idea about how to go about spotting fake observations and tracking down copyright violations. Many of them did not even know how to create a copyright flag.
Even more discouraging, I walked multiple people through it step-by-step, and a few of them created a flag or two. One did a couple dozen. Then they stopped.
Meanwhile, since CNC happened, I have created 229 pages worth of copyright flags, which at 50 flags per page works out to around 11,450 flags. At least 95% of those are CNC related, and there are multiple other curators who have put in similar amounts of effort.
I realize it is a choice to spend my time on the task, but it kills me to see the amazing work of actual dedicated naturalists and photographers being buried under enormous piles of garbage observations.
For CNC 2025, the “winner” for most species was Cochabamba, Bolivia, with
109,423 observations of 7,134 species by 3,230 users.
In the months since, a few latecomers have added observations from earlier in the year, so the number of observations and users have increased slightly, to 110,521 observations and 3,250 users. However, after months of identifier corrections, the number of species has gone from 7,134 to 4,546, a reduction of 2,588 species.
However, that number still includes not only all the cultivated plants, but also all the copyright-flagged ones, the ones with date / location falsification, etc.
If we limit it to verifiable observations, the picture becomes much clearer:
28,287 observations, 2,530 species, 2,172 observers
That’s 81,136 casual observations, and a 4,604-species reduction. And 1,058 users who did not submit a single verifiable observation.
As for the remaining “verifiable” observations, six out of the top twelve contributors have had their accounts suspended for extensive falsification of other observations. Another 4 have falsified at least 1 observation in some way but have not been suspended. And I strongly suspect the other 2 have altered the dates of most of their photos, but since they are stripped of metadata I cannot prove it.
I cannot emphasize enough that this is one single CNC project and it is not even an outlier in terms of data issues - it just happens to be the one I’ve spent the most time working on.
They cannot delete their wrong ID, so WE have to work harder to overturn it. Why ? iNat is rewarding and encouraging bad behaviour. Once burnt, twice shy - for future CNC I will stick to locations which are better behaved. But I feel for the good observers and their embattled local identifiers. I can walk away from Cochabamba …