Update: I was examining many botanical garden and innercity park data recently and the situation is even worse than I have imagined. All of them (without a single exception) were marked false as “organism is wild”. This does not make sense. Please try this yourselfes, before you write your opinion.
I certainly don’t deny that your problem exists or even that it is widespread, but which botanical gardens are you looking at that have wild observations with “not a single exception”? I tried some random areas on Kew Botanical Gardens. This area for instance contains around 300 plant observations, of which around 230 are marked as cultivated (with quite a significant proportion of the 70 wild observations appearing indeed to be self-setting weeds rather than cultivated plants): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?captive=false&lat=51.478963678087695&lng=-0.2931950184930554&place_id=any&radius=0.1367690121956404&subview=map&taxon_id=47126&verifiable=any
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I searched for european species on other continents. All adventive data in botanical and house gardens were marked as wild. None of them as cultivated.
Adventive plants are wild on iNat, anything not planted is wild. So, if you saw so many observations that were marked as wild (not just being uploaded as wild), that means you saw many self-seeded plants that observers had to mark so others won’t think those are planted.
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If you force observers on upload to choose between Wild and Not Wild - they will choose. Whatever, without it necessarily being true.
Starting from Unknown, I add an ID and leave a ‘garden plant’ comment.
When I get notified of a second ID, then I make it Not Wild.
If it’s obviously exotic, in a pot or a vase - then Not Wild with that first ID.
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Thank you for this information. I agree fully with ddennism and he explained the problem better than me.
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If someone uploaded something hoping for it to be identified, then identifying it isn’t a waste of time.
A few of mine turned out to be. Unfamiliar place while traveling, interface between urban and wild, I haven’t always known that an unfamilar plant there was cultivated.
And in that circumstance, the suggestion of the OP would not have helped, because I would have chosen “organism is wild;” then it would have taken two votes to switch it to cultivated.
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I don’t know anything about IDing house plants from around the world. I’m pretty good at identifying plants that grow wild locally. If I’m sifting through a bunch of observations that should not be there because someone didn’t mark their tropical house plants as captive, it is wasting my time.
If you live anywhere near a botanical garden and want to ID wild plants, you may have to sift through pages of cultivate plants that are not marked as such.
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