Introduced means it arrived because of human activity, while native means it arrived without human assistance.
The term “human assistance” implicitly assumed that the “species” in not human being, because we cannot “assist” ourselves. So this definition cannot apply to Homo sapiens. Everyone arrived in their current homeland because of human activity and without human “assistance,” we are both native and introduced.
Humans are all captive animals that domesticated themselves to form culture. We are not wild because most of us are part of the broader human society and separated ourselves from nature at least somewhat. However, this is a philosophical question that shows up in the DQA because there is no row (or no need for a row) for “Is not a human.”
The term “human assistance” implicitly assumed that the “species” in not human being, because we cannot “assist” ourselves
Gray area, in my opinion. Humans help themselves, especially their disabled family members, travel as nomads to other areas to build new establishments. We would not get by without helping one another. However, yes, the wording used here is weird and should probably be changed to be more specific and say something like “Humans had not arrived in this area until about $`x_thousands_of_years_ago`.”
The DQA makes less sense for humans than it does for the intended taxa to be uploaded to iNaturalist. Either we ban observations of humans entirely, create a non-user-fillable row “Is not a human” and replace the UI elements for the DQA rows “Evidence of organism” and “Organism is wild” (keep the agreements and disagreements to these rows in the database for posterity), or continue as we are.
One could argue endlessly about whether humans qualify as native or introduced in various regions, but the conclusion is the same: iNat is not the place to do it. So I agree, removing the establishment means for Homo sapiens everywhere (and perhaps even removing it as an option) is the go-to choice here. I do not see any downside to implementing this - perhaps it should be moved to Feature Requests?
I think captive/cultivated is a bit more difficult. I agree it should not apply to observations of humans, but there may be disagreement over whether an observation is of a human or something else. I can still see it as being useful (albeit very sparingly) for observations that were initially though to be human but then there is disagreement (or something along those lines).
I think by iNat’s definitions, Humans are both native and introduced everywhere they occur, since they get everywhere under their own power, but their own power is by definition anthropogenic means. Therefore, I see no reason to allow the option to vote them wild or not, as it doesn’t really apply.