As we see now, a few days after my “complaint” or let us call “constructive criticising” without presenting solutions for mentioned problems, or let’s say challenges, this was, yet is most needed. In case any kind of complaining or critizising is mis-interpreted as offensive, or degrading towards the whole iNaturalist forum or people engaging, this will keep from growing in any way. Yes, iNat shall grow, get more mature, but not degrade and lose it’s inspiration by inflation of unwanted mis-information.
I never had thought that my initial sharing of my frustration would provoke so many reactions, and i liked to thank all participants! This is a great chance to help iNat to think about it’s future aims, there is a lot to be changed for not to turn into kind of wasteplace!
Neither complaints or critizism is our real challenge, just the way we are dealing with, making the best out of it.
Yep, that’s what I meant - in an ideal world, I’d like to be able to flag something as captive/cultivated while still allowing it to be available for ID by others. If I happen to know what it is I will usually provide the ID and also mark as cultivated.
It bothers me when experienced users do. If it is in a pot, garden, zoo, aquarium, or clearly isn’t wild at that location (zebras in the US), I just mark it as not-wild and move on. For really new users, I use the boilerplate text from the Frequently Used Responses:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses#notwild
but that does not address the observations which are spoof, unclassifiable or the like
I’m a little cautious about marking a plant as cultivated purely because it is in a pot. I occasionally take a cutting or a seedling and grow it on in a pot until it is of identifiable size and I doubt I am the only one. But if I was to then put it on iNaturalist I would explain how it came to be in a pot and that the record details are from where and when it was collected.
I don’t get the impression this is something iNat wants, perhaps because of their funding sources. I myself almost left when I first joined because of the cold shoulder cultivated plants recieve here. I remember asking the forum “okay then where is the website for garden plants?” and if any one had had a reply, I would have went there instead.
Taking a seed or seedling or cutting and growing it on in a pot until it’s identifiable would fit the very definition of “cultivated”. It’s being intentionally grown by man, whether it turns out to be a native plant or a weed or other.
Of course, unintended plants can turn up in a pot as well. I’d guess that the instances of plants that would be “important” to the primary purpose of iNat, but are overlooked because they’ve turned up unintended in pots and been mistakenly marked as “cultivated”, would likely be quite rare. The person who made the observation can always come back and make a comment to correct the mistaken “cultivated” flag, also.
As @je9h said your plant is cultivated, what’s needed is to post original seed and add @similar observation set" for it and grown plant, plus adding comments. First obs will be wild, second will be captive.
Replying to myself again. Thanks to a post by @bouteloua I found the critical workaround to exclude Unknown place/date, making a much smaller, maybe even manageable pile!
Tack this onto your Casuals url of choice, forcing it to yield only things in the World in the last century or so:
&place_id=97394%2C97393&d1=1900-01-01
…Oops no, I misread and the placeid’s above do not capture “The World”, only North America and Oceana. How to widen the scope to include the whole globe?
Very clever
I mark plants as cultivated if they are in pots. If the observer explains why I shouldn’t, I’ll remove that, of course. But nearly all plants in pots are cultivated.
I mostly do the same. Though I sometimes allow for the chance they are “volunteers”.
I do the same. If I post a picture of a plant in a pot and don’t say it’s wild in the description I would expect someone to mark as cultivated.
Include place IDs for all continents? Europe* has multiple places, I’m guessing the “including oceans” one would be best. I’m not sure if anywhere would be excluded if you listed all continents. For many purposes picking one place would be fine anyway.
* Guessing other continents are similar.
Of course, it is not a matter of not trusting in other users but simply becase they are obviously cultivated. Every skilled botanist can recognise those species that spontaneously grow in pots like Erigeron spp., Stellaria spp., Poa annua, Sonchus spp. and so on…
I’d value those (many fortunately) users who have always posted interesting observations rather than worrying if someone could leave iNat because has been suggested to use iNat differently.
It seems to me that this problem could be easily and completely solved by stopping marking observations wild by default, and instead making users explicitly specify them as wild.
For advanced users, there could be a setting that you could change, that would allow you to specify to mark your observations wild by default, but this way iNaturalist could make them read a blurb and check a box to make sure that they understand what they’re doing.
I think the problem here is casual use. The wild / cultivated flag is buried in the Data Quality Assessment (DQA) and an overwhelming majority of users don’t touch the DQA, nor is it shown very prominently when submitting observations.
Even moderately conscientious users may just be leaving this field blank because they don’t know about it and don’t know that it’s an issue. The average person is not really aware of the important distinctions between wild and cultivated/captive organisms and the implications it has for scientific research, conservation, and population tracking.
Is there any potential objection of why people would not want to implement such a solution, i.e. have the field default to some null state or “unspecified” state and then only marking things as wild if a user has explicitly specified it, and then allowing users to set that as a default, but only after knowing what it means?
Well, that would eliminate the “cultivated not marked as such” problem but it would create a new problem, a set of observations that are “wild not marked as such”.
Your proposed setting would fix things for power users, but among the long tail of observers who make a small number of observations, I wonder what the distribution is of wild vs cultivated observations? I have a feeling the new problem might be bigger than the old problem, but without stats it’s hard to substantiate.
One small comment Barbara, @sedgequeen – A female Gingko biloba, assuming that there are males around, will make enormous amounts of fruit. The fruits drop all around the tree, and even here in New York City, all of them seem to germinate and grow into seedlings. I guess they usually don’t spread around much, unless maybe squirrels take the “nut” part and plant it somewhere, but I have recorded wild Gingko seedlings in tree pits on my block here.
I would question the need to redefine the default assumptions about records on the site, or force users to verify them. If someone else has an interest or need to know about geographical accuracy, should they propose every observation requires the ‘location is accurate’ field is confirmed etc.
I agree with the solution to have an optional separate tier for cultivated items, with an appropriate tier of ‘confirmed’ if there’s two agreeing IDs. It would make it easier for people who do venture into them to ID them, and may have the potential to attract gardeners like me to the app, as well as not slow us down by looking at observations that already have IDs. Think of all the insect observations we’d add! 
The cultivated status box needs to be checked in order to be seen, just like casual, to avoid it clouding up wild searches.
To reduce potential problems, cultivated observations could still be exempt from from AI learning if they would confuse the AI’s abilities. Maybe a small tip can display about the AI’s ability to recognize non-wild observations when someone uses the AI to ID it, giving awareness on another occasional problem.