Acknowledging that iNat is an open platform that many of us use in ways that suit our own purposes (and that my own use of the description field does not always conform strictly to the basic purpose I suggested), where I’d suggest the practice described in the OP becomes “bad” is when the information is provided in a way where it could be misunderstood as evidence of the organism. The case upupa-epops describes underscores the distinction. I can’t imagine this is usually motivated by an intent to deceive, just a misunderstanding of the way the site is set up. I think the “What counts as evidence” discussion topic is relevant to this, as are anecdotes (I can’t remember in which topic) of new users uploading images they took from the internet seemingly not to falsely claim they had personally observed them, but just seeming to think that was what you do on iNaturalist- upload pictures of animals, right? A little guidance from the rest of the user base helps those users.
I think there are ways to address the case in this topic- for example to ask the user about the relationship between their observation and the copied text in their description- ideally that might motivate the observer to add something like “when I was watching this bird it seemed to fit the following description from x guide,” which clarifies that relationship. I took it that the OP was just seeking to discuss the etiquette of initiating that conversation, just as we’ve discussed advising users to split multi-species observations and similar cases previously.
All those uses sound ideal, @octobertraveler. With observations like grasses that have a lot of technical characters in the ID, I often list those key characters especially when I wasn’t able to show that feature in a photo. I try to make it clear that I actually measured it.
I just hope that when someone says “has large curved thorns” and they aren’t in the picture, that they actually saw them.
The plagiarism thing is really not the issue I intended to address, but like colinpurrington, I couldn’t have said it better myself about that. ;-)
Personally, I don’t understand the point of copying and pasting info from a field guide or wikipedia in an observation’s description, seems a strange place to put it. I understand it even less when doing so is part of an assignment from a teacher - how is this beneficial to the student? But I don’t want to derail this discussion.
Any of my own weirdness aside, I don’t really see an issue here. I’ve never come across anyone doing this who is attempting to pass off the text as their own, which to me is the truly unethical aspect of plagiarism. They’re mostly just unaware that they should attribute text that’s not theirs. In that case, I think a comment like what @susanhewitt suggested is great.
Is what you put in there not covered by the license you configure your account to, and therefore a problem in that you are asserting copyright over the text when you submit the record, which is not legal even in cases of fair use claims?
In the event the iNat staff receive an order from the author/publisher to remove a sentence about a moth’s wingspan or something from someone’s iNat observations, I’m sure the staff can choose to remove it from the description. Otherwise, I really don’t see why we should be bothering with caring about it in most cases. Whether or not something is technically against a law is one thing, but whether or not it actually matters is another. But anyway, since:
I’ll leave it at that and suggest, if interested, someone could open a separate topic to discuss plagiarism on iNat (which could be in journal posts, descriptions, comments, guides, etc).