Editing a place boundary

Hi all,

I’m not sure if this is the topic to post to, but I’m having an issue editing a place. Specifically, I’m trying to make boundaries for Gainesville, FL, USA (https://www.inaturalist.org/places/gainesville). It is currently a point on the map, but I’d like to change it to a polygon I’ve made in ArcMap. Normally there is a link that says “Edit Place”, but this link is absent from the Gainseville place page. Am I overlooking some very basic detail? I’m not sure that making a new “Gainseville” place is the right choice, but that’s my only option if I can’t edit the current place.

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Hi Alex,
You can only edit the Places you created. Did you create this one?

Sometimes there are two places with the same name. A good way to find ALL the Places with tgat name is in Global Search, choosing "Find all " then selecting Places from the tabs/buttons.

Actually Alex is a curator, and curators can edit places they did not create.

That being said, there are some places that for some unknown reason are missing the edit and delete functionality (I have never figured out what the commonality is for them), even for curators, and this appears to be one of them.

So your best best is to recreate, and send a note with the link to the admins and ask if they can remove the other.

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Ah, ok :( I was hoping this was not the answer… Thank you!

It may be non editable due to the fact there are 3 projects associated with the place, which will be a complicating factor in getting it removed.

I’ll try to contact the project admins and see if they want to reassign their project boundaries.

EDIT - JK, looks like that is not an option.

I see thanks.

I have run into this problem with Charlottesville, a location with three “places”, of which I can only edit one even as a curator.

Can we edit place boundaries as curators (such as for Gainsville, FL), and if not for certain places, why can we only edit some places, but not others? The three project explanation does not seem to explain places like Charlottesville with less than two projects.

Hmm, I’m quite confused about all this.

I’m not sure the best way to notify the admins about this. Is there a subsection of the forum designed for contacting them?

I’ve made a temporary alternative. https://www.inaturalist.org/places/gainesville-temporary-alternative Still not sure how to solve this problem.

in the past, I’ve just created a new polygon-based place and then merged it with the point-based place (that i didn’t create), keeping the boundaries of the new place and the name of the old place. don’t need to be a curator to do that, though i’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

Just to be clear i was not suggesting that 3 was some kind of magic number or threshold for a number of projects linked to the place, merely that this particular example happened to have 3.

I merged them, and I think it worked (although both places still exist). It’s not a true “merge” but the borders were changed for the original place. And I was able to change the place type from “town” to “municipality” that way.

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Hi! Definitely, it is definitely plausible, perhaps with 2 being the threshold.

There are single point places I have tried to remove from my home province that have no projects associated with them which are locked for edit or deletion, so I suspect it is unrelated.

It looks like “gainesville-temporary-alternative” does not exist anymore, so maybe both places existing was just temporary while the merger finalized.

The new Gainesville place looks great BTW @alex_abair. I’m glad you were able to fix the boundaries.

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a little off-topic, but does anyone know why point-based places exist? point-based places don’t seem to have much usefulness in the system but maybe i’m not seeing some angle.

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I think a lot of them are simply errors, users want to create a new place, and type in the name of the town or park or whatever and think some kind of techno-magic will properly define it for them, and of course all that happens is they get the single point that comes up in the search they did.

I suspect it may have been an automated import from Yahoo Maps in the early days–I guess maybe they’re useful if you’re searching the map to manually place observations?

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“It looks like “gainesville-temporary-alternative” does not exist anymore”

I actually deleted it after the merge.

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