Oh yeah, I absolutely agree that global and local organizers both need to listen to the comments brought up by the community, apologies if my comment came off as though I didn’t.
I know sometimes when expressing concerns online it can feel like the discussion isn’t reaching those who are actually reaching those who are in a position to make those bigger changes (global organizers in this case). I just wanted to let folks know that the comments have been heard, even if I can’t tell you how it’s going to be addressed yet. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the global organizers are still working out for themselves the best way to do so.
Your message was fine … I was just saying that I hope staff (who might have more leverage than the rest of us) talks to the organizers about these concerns.
I’m not a curator but I believe generally duplicates are permitted on iNat. At least, I once asked staff about a butterfly that been posted as 40+ different observations and for which the account did not respond to comments, and I was told that this was permitted.
However- if the duplicates are recorded with different dates or locations, I would mark DQA for inaccurate date/location, unless you can somehow figure out which date/location is actually correct.
I’ve also started to look through the Cochabamba observations and I immediately found a photo of a caterpillar that was posted 5 times by the same user and identified as 5 different species. Another user had already added disagreeing IDs to help solve the issue, but it’s unfortunate that there’s nothing more that can be done for what seems to be a dishonest attempt to drive up numbers at the expense of identifiers’ time and effort.
And I have also come across problematic observations where the user was suspended, which I agree just makes it difficult (nearly impossible) to find other observations made by that user to assess their quality.
Edit: I’ve just discovered that you can still find suspended users’ observations by editing the URL (user_id=TypeUserHere).
Comment I left on the linked feature request to SHOW us that this observer / identifier is Suspended - without requiring us to first click thru to a ‘blank’ profile to see … Suspended!!
Yes, some duplicates are ok (as in, they shouldn’t be flagged). A “true” duplicate is one where the observer duplicated their own observation, generally unintentionally. If a user is making a lot of these, they should be contacted via comments/messages and asked to correct the issue. In rare cases where users continue to upload large quantities of duplicates and don’t response, they have been suspended (but this is definitely rare).
Another situation that sometimes gets called a duplicate (but really isn’t) is when 2 or more observers both observe the same individual organism on their own. These often happen on group outings when something cool is found and everyone snaps their own photo. This is 100% ok.
The situation described above doesn’t seem like a duplicate, but rather one user using another’s photos (assuming this due to the discussion of copyright - a user can’t violate their own copyright on iNat as far as I know). This situation is generally a copyright issue, unless the user truthfully states that they are using another person’s photo with permission. This isn’t ideal, but is allowed in low quantities. If another user is wholesale using other observers’ photos without acknowledgement, general practice is to let them know about the issue and flag all but the first observation using the photo for copyright infringement.
Yup, we’ve met with them once already and will continue to meet with them to improve things on the organization/outreach end and hopefully on the technical end. Suggestions brought up on the forum are part of our discussions. I can’t make any specific promises, but I believe there will be changes.
Question: If a user is suspended for violations, why are his observations still there? Should they be deleted or maybe stored somewhere (where they could be retrieved if the suspension ends), rather than still wasting our time.
I’d like to see different types of suspension - if someone was suspended for aggressive behavior towards other users, for example, there’s no reason why their observations shouldn’t remain and be useful to others. But if someone is suspended for falsifying data, I’d like an option that basically does the same as a spam flag, and hides all their observations from default searches.
There are other threads that reference some of the reasons a suspended user’s content may remain on the platform (for many users, large portions of their content is useful), or, in rare cases, be deleted altogether (when it degrades iNat’s content in extreme cases) .
Deletion is a pretty extreme measure (on any platform) and effectively irreversible after a short time on iNat, so it should probably only be done in very limited and clearly defined circumstances. There are also lots of discussions on the forum about how deletion of accounts and their content causes all sorts of other problems on the platform, including confusion in ID/comment strings, etc. I don’t think making account deletion much more common should be considered as a large scale solution.
I can only imagine that measures like having multiple types of suspension, hiding some content from searches (but not removing it), different ways of counting suspended users content, etc. would add confusion to users as well. Some of our most common questions on the forum are already “Why doesn’t this observation appear in this project”, “Why isn’t this observation RG?”, etc. Adding more reasons why this could be the case that are less transparent/easily understandable to most users would just increase this problem. In my mind, increasing the platform complexity and the costs to user experience that go along with that isn’t worth it to deal with this problem (at least not before other measures have been tried, below). And I do agree that it is a problem!
I personally do think that some of the CNC accounts involved in large scale falsification do merit being deleted along with all of their content, but I appreciate that figuring out consistent and clear guidelines on how to do this is challenging. It’s also a labor intensive process (staff conducting on a one-off basis), and inherently non-transparent (see forum discussions of how account deletion causes other issues with disappeared content referenced above). It’s not a process that works at scale.
My own thought is that we should be looking at “preventative medicine” here as the most optimal “cure” first - most of the issues related to CNC can probably be significantly reduced by implementing some of the suggestions from the community on this thread and others about restructuring CNC and how people and cities participate in it. I would want to see if/how those work before implementing more draconian measures like larger scale account deletion or different tiers of content (different types of suspended users, etc.).
may I suggest taking a break from identifying instead of imposing restrictions on other users or calling for platform wide changes? If you don’t find identifying rewarding without conditions as far as the other users go, then surely focusing your efforts elsewhere is more productive.
When I mentioned “duplicate observations”, I wasn’t talking about different people taking photos of the same organism; I meant people stealing other user’s photos to create fake observations of their own, often with totally bogus locations.