Disable DQA for observations identified as *Homo sapiens*

[cthawley]

I will also add an interesting reference that came up in the suggested topics below (the Discourse AI is getting better at suggesting relevant topics…)

Summed up as:

@lotteryd

Humans being automarked captive “[is] not intended, but if it’s getting automatically marked as captive that would only happen if actual users have been marking humans as captive… which seems like a common problem. The automated votes are meant to amplify the work of minorities because so few people bother to mark things as captive, but clearly it leads to a lot of inaccurate data when it amplifies inaccurate data. I guess we’d consider functional changes to prevent that for humans (and yes, the Forum would be the place to start that discussion, but I don’t know what thread), but as with all crowdsourcing, the most important check against people’s poor judgement is the good judgement of other people, so if this really matters to you, you can start by marking observations of captive humans as wild.”

on this observation:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/150184151

[spiphany]

@treeprophet

However, I question the utility of pessimism when talking about these issues. People at large CAN deal with gentle changes.

It isn’t pessimism or obstructionism. When suggesting a major change it is important to think through all likely implications, even – and especially – the negative ones. If you believe that “people have become too comfortable uploading garbage” it is important to look at who is doing so and why, and how they can be discouraged from doing so in the first place. A policy that punishes users for uploading certain types of observations (by deleting their content) is generally not the best way to do so.

But I agree that we are drifting rather far from the purpose of the thread. I support the idea of removing the DQA item wild/not wild for observations identified as human. I’m not sure one of the questions I raised upthread has been answered – would previous “not wild” votes still count as active, as I believe is (or was? has it been fixed?) the case for other DQA items that no longer apply to an observation (e.g., “evidence related to the same subject” for observations that originally had more multiple media files and now only have one)? If so, this would not really solve the purpose of removing the DQA item.

[DianaStuder]

Has 3 against 1 Wild votes.
And still Casual.
?
Add a new ID - and delete later to force a re-index. Still Casual!
52K humans are ‘not Wild’.

[annkatrinrose]

@cthawley

Another user had already interacted with this observation, and, without IDing it, had downvoted it for “Wild”, presumably to make it casual.

I occasionally go through that “captive unknowns” pool for my location and the vast majority of these are cultivated/potted plants. The next most common category are indeed humans and human artifacts. I suspect the sentiment behind not giving an ID is that some folks who do this feel that iNat shouldn’t be used for these types of observations and thus those are not worthy of spending the time to give an ID.

@cthawley

I also wonder if perhaps, for observations which are Unknown, the “Wild” DQA should be disabled, since it specifically refers to the organism, and the focal organism in an Unknown observation is not defined.

Oh, I like that idea, though I wonder if that would just increase the number of things marked “Life” which is basically still unknown.

[jasonhernandez74]

@yayemaster

In my opinion, there is no scientific value in marking human observations with DQA votes. All human observations are “Casual” by default

As the casual-by-default applies also to the good-faith observations of chewing gum (or paint) “lichens” and polyester batting mistaken for seed fluff, I don’t see any reason for controversy. I added my vote.