Fellow iNatters!
The Curator Guide says “We typically leave the following types of flags left unresolved: true spam flags, photos flagged for copyright infringement, and duplicate observations.”
There are about 5,000 open duplicate flags, give or take, all dating from May 2022 or earlier. As I understand it, back in the day, the point of flagging duplicates was to keep them from reaching Research Grade. (Flagged observations get flipped to Casual for as long as the flag remains open). But in May 2022, Staff implemented procedures to stop “Duplicate” flags from being made.
It’s been a while since there’s been any discussion about these flags. At this point, what’s the basis for not working/resolving these flags?
Back in May 2022, I imagine it wouldn’t have necessarily been popular to instantly pivot from tacitly allowing “Duplicate” flags, to more-or-less saying they were all for naught. But now? Also, I understand many folks wish for iNaturalist to do something about duplicate observations; there are ample feature request posts attesting to that.
But does maintaining this set of old “Duplicate” flags as forever-open, at this point, serve any useful purpose? Why should a haphazard collection of duplicate observations from a number of years ago be treated any differently than the rest of the duplicate observations on this site?
I ask this as somebody who’s recently been going through all our old, still-open flags, looking for things that can be closed. Spam and copyright flags are segregated from the rest, but “Duplicate” flags are not. There were an awful lot of other flags sitting amidst those old “Duplicate” flags (even with filtering); more remain. It looks like somebody else has recently been going through the duplicate flags themselves, to check whether they actually still are duplicates.
These old “Duplicate” flags, I posit, no longer make any sense; they continue to mask whether there are any real issues hidden amidst them, and more fundamentally, there’s no good reason for the underlying flagged observations to be treated any differently than other duplicate observations. Why not work/resolve these flags?
There’s more to say, but this is already long. What do you think?
(And Happy iNatting, everybody!)