well said,
and said better than what I was saying - that yes the commons is essentially driven by a community - in this case the wonderful community here.
He was. His exact words were:
So the question is: when observations, comments (on observations) or IDs (of observations) – i.e. Data – disappear, is it because moderating team members disappeared them, or because the people who posted them changed their minds? It makes a difference to the point being made here.
I will say that iNat overall is a very tolerant bunch. There are observations on here that, if the same image was posted to BugGuide, would quickly get moved the their “frass” folder, with an admonishment not to post such low-quality images.
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Among the many things said this stands out and is also why i encourage users to join inaturalist
that even poor photographs / sounds have a place - not all poor records (photographs or sounds will get identified) but when they do they do add valuable data *and help the algorithm too i suppose).
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We are all citizens of earth
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That is an example of the etymological fallacy. Words mean what people use and understand them to mean, and often not what the derivation would suggest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy
All connotation depends on the perceiver but we should not pretend that the popular perception of the word is negated by the etymology.
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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
As Lewis Carroll said. (In 1871)
English is a living language, so yes, meaning does change over time with usage.
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That is a great quote. It is interesting that over time the field of linguistics has largely come to agree with Humpty.
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I have read a lot of the comments on this thread with valuable insight. I am not a citizen of the country where I reside and find myself sharing nature with other folks who might share my immigration status. Using “Citizen” is exclusionary based on immigration status – who does this belong to and who does it serve. I have found people very welcoming where the term community or participatory makes me feel like I belong.
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An interesting perspective. As I have said many times, Amateur Scientist would resolve issues like this. If I were to visit where you live, we would both be amateur scientists! I would not belong to the ‘community’ nor would I be a ‘citizen’. Yet we could work together or at least alongside each other.
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Thank you. This is the best explanation I have seen of issues with indiscriminate use of “community science” as a replacement for “citizen science”.
Keeping this in mind, I believe there are many situations where community science is a better term than citizen science to describe why and how to use iNaturalist.
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I suspect that if you have an address at an academic institution or government agency, you would not be considered a CS. If you’re not affiliated with one or the other, and are doing research on your own time, you’d be considered a CS. At least that’s how a professional researcher might view it. That might be presumptuous, since many researchers are either retired from a professional position or in between such jobs, or they are accomplished amateurs in their research field who have published their findings. There’s definitely a gray area there.
Surely a scientist has a formal qualification.
But doesn’t become an unscientist if not employed or affiliated.
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Seems I am a Non-citizen scientist too. Am top iNat observer in two Caribbean countries and don’t hold citizenship of either of these.
And Citizen science / Citizen scientist sounds very much like a derogatory term coined by scientists with institutional affiliation. Wonder why anybody would love to be called that…
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Because I’m a citizen of something more important than political entities. I’m a citizen of planet Earth. You know, the home of all this wonderful biology we observe.
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“Citizen of planet earth” Would love to get that passport. Would probably solve lots of border-trouble for me and many other people too. Seems I failed to find the office in charge so far 
.
I’m puzzled by this topic. As I noted above,
Citizen Science is a brand, not a description. Nobody thinks that the General Motors product they’re tooling along in is actually an antelope of the species Aepyceros melampus. Why are people so adamant about imposing a literal description as the generic brand name for doing stuff like iNatting?
Frankly, I think that the sloppy use of the word science is a bigger issue. I’ll start a topic on that once I come up with a suitably metaphorical title for it.
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Phrase was coined in the mid-nineties but the concept goes back millennia - says Nature in 2018
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07106-5
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Science can be descriptive or experimental. INat does seem to fall in the first category and it delivers information about the distribution of living organisms on earth: A field of science called biogeography. The biogeographical information we as observers and identifiers provide through iNat (to gbif) either confirm already published knowledge, or provides new information, not published before.
iNat only gathers data, science starts when data is analyzed.
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Filter the iNat database for a species and go to map view. What you see is one of currently 344932 species specific distribution area analyses, directely available through iNat. Yes the analyses has been crowd sourced and observations and identifications are provided by many people. Not everybody of these people has academic education. That doesnt mean their contribution is less significant than when a university professor does the same with data he/she gathered.