I’m very much in support of @jeanphilippeb’s proposal to have a Data Quality Assessment field such as “Images are of the same individual(s)” that, when false, makes the observation casual and removes its images from use in illustrating the taxon or consideration by AI.
Importantly, this assessment should also trigger a notification that explains to the multiple-image issue to the observer and helps them fix it. This seems like something for which iNat could seek community help with translation.
There is no circumstance in which a user who uploads a photo of a daisy and a daffodil to the same observation was looking to have some smart-alec iNat identifier tell them that the lowest common parent taxon for these is “Angiospermae”. Equally, there is no researcher who would find value in an observation that cannot be improved beyond that subphylum ID.
An easy way for identifiers to quickly and politely inform observers that photos need to be split into separate observations would help everyone involved. This is something I do now. A minority of observers remain active or return to the site and they’re universally happy to be alerted to the issue.
I can see several incremental improvements that would enhance this new DQA capability:
- Logic that preserves this “Same individual” DQA flag when an observation is duplicated, but resets it on the original or duplicate observation when an image is deleted.
- Workflow linked from the notification that the observer receives to guide them through the process of splitting the observation.
- A policy that permits observations where same_individual=false for which the observer has been inactive for more than a specific threshold (90 days? 1 year?) to be automatically split into multiple observations, each still owned by the observer and with appropriate notification.
For the last one, I appreciate the hesitancy to override an observer’s control, but I just don’t see a scenario where this is problematic. Today, when I add comments to alert observers that their observation contains unrelated photos, most of the time nothing happens because the observer has long ago become inactive and so their observations will remain unfixed.
But let’s think through the intentions of that inactive user and their expectations if they were later to return to iNat. Let’s say I upload an observation with pictures of a daisy and a daffodil, don’t return to iNat for a long time, and then come back and find I now have two observations, each IDed to species level. In what scenario would my intentions have been disrespected?