I very often update taxon photos / icons so it represents the taxon in the best way.
I even do some trips to get better photos of species so I can improve the taxon photo (when the images available on iNat doesn’t represent the species very well, or when no photos of certain features / life stages / variations are available yet).
However, it happens so often that people carelessly update them so their own photos are icons, or / and without good reasoning (e.g. all five photos showing the same colour variation of the species, instead of including the best diversity possible).
Obviously it is meant to be improved by everyone’s work, but at the moment, there are way too many cases where very carefully selected series of taxon photos are changed into a very random photo series by just one careless user.
The update that allowed us to see the History was nice, but it doesn’t stop this from happening.
Do we have any good solution to this?
I think I might do a feature request like below if there’s no good solution to this.
・Enable to revert the change just like Wikipedia does, because at the moment, destroying the series of photos is much easier than reverting the change back - and it is very unfair, especially for keen updaters like me who spend hours going through photos to select the best representatives.
・Enable notifications for taxon photo update
・Implement vote system for taxon photo change (which probably would be unlikely because of complexity and some downsides but eBird is reasonably successful with this)
This is not to blame people who update the taxon photos, because they probably have good intentions in order for them to spend their time updating.
However, the current system allows a very carefully selected series of images including best diversity of characters of the taxon to be ruined by just one user and I don’t think that is ideal (and it is happening too often).
You can add a taxon flag so a curator can start a civil discussion with everyone involved. I think it’s not too hard to add a photo back if you know the photo number (which is preserved in the history).
I agree that I would like an easier way to revert changes. The history is great to have, but it isn’t very intuitive to use. It can take a few minutes to dig up the pics and revert changes, depending on how much has been changed. I think some kind of versioning that allowed rolling back wouldn’t be too hard to implement (I say without any actual knowledge). This would also help in cases where there is trolling by changing pics too (though there have been other measures taken against that).
I wonder - in your sort of carefully curated case - if changing taxon pictures should be behind a harder barrier.
If you change the photo - you must - give your reason - before iNat will let you change something.
I would be happy to give my reason each time. Lots of butterflies but I added a caterpillar, or one with closed wings, or the yellow variant among all the orange ones, whatever.
And then - if your ‘reason’ is I want to see MY picture - you get blocked from making future changes. This is not your picture gallery.
A pop up text warning - the changes you make to taxon pictures affect everybody who uses iNat! (Newbies may not realise that other people see their choice) Is your change useful, or even necessary??
We hear your frustration. Question for you: have you tried private messaging the user who changed photos to ask their reason for changing, to explain or link to inat’s best practices, to share your intentions?
This has worked for us for creating mutual understanding regarding resolving taxon photo changes. Hope you are able to resolve it to your mutual satisfaction.
Can the user who adds/changes photos be identified? I frequently add or rearrange moth photos as better ones become available. Can users recognize that it was me who made those changes?
Thank you so much all for your thoughtful replies. It’s a difficult problem.
If it happened just once I would just do this, but it has been happening multiple times and I’m sure it will happen more in the future.
For me, it’s more about the fact that the system allows anyone to accidentally ruin hours of effort, without being notified about how impacting it will be, and it goes fully unnoticed.
This fact alone demotivates me so much.
I would be happy to put even more effort into editing taxon photos if if required a bit of extra process to edit, so that people can’t change it so easily without recognising the impact of the change (or, we get notifications so we can come back to see if it’s improved or not).
But obviously I don’t want it to be too limited, because frequent improvement is nice, and if the process gets too cumbersome it might stop people from trying to improve it which is not what we want.
So, even if I messaged the person who did it and managed to have an agreement with them, unfortunately it won’t really be a solution for me.
Also, although this is just my personal opinion, iNat’s icon photos are pretty big part of iNaturalist.
I treat it as seriously as iNat’s taxonomy, because it’s what represents the species, and people use icon photos very often for ID purposes.
Yes I do that sometimes. But my main concern is not about creating mutual understanding with one user (although I want to do so as well), it’s about the system itself that allows it to happen.
The current system basically overwrites what was there before.
Let’s say for example, imagine if an observation’s community identification changed only based on a single newest ID added by someone. Wouldn’t it be frustrating?
And unfortunately, since iNat is a giant global social network, some people are not very keen to have a discussion to create a mutual understanding. Ideally, the system should be built in a way so their presence doesn’t ruin the system too much.
However, blocking someone from making changes doesn’t sound too friendly, and because of nature of photography this
decision will end up pretty subjective (because one could argue they thought their photos were the best representatives even if they clearly weren’t, and there’s literally nothing we can argue against it).
Maybe it would be ideal to make it like this:
whenever someone wants to update the current photo series, it allows them to do so tentatively, and it creates a pop-up voting box for people to upvote and downvote just like how Community ID is done, saying something like ‘‘Do you believe this change clearly improves the original photo series in terms of representing the taxon?’’
Once they get certain amount of agreement (or ratio - could be discussed), it finally gets updated officially - and if they don’t, it doesn’t get reflected.
To prevent people from making suckpuppet accounts, maybe it would be best if people who wants to vote needed to have contributed to iNat for more than a certain period.
But I can imagine it’ll require some intense work on GitHub…
IMO this is the best of the current options, not directly messaging the user. If someone’s changing up taxon photos, they should be able to explain/defend/discuss those changes publicly if asked. Start a flag and, in a non-judgemental way explain why you had arranged the photos in such a fashion and ask them why they changed the photos. To me it’s not about creating a mutual undersatnding between one user, but making it clear to people that their changes affect others and they should be thoughtful when making them.
I’d like to add an explanation field that’s required before one can save taxon photo changes as well, so the person needs to explain their motiviations and reasoning.
Votes…I’m not sure that would work well. People could easily ask their friends or others to vote for their photos, it would be difficult to discern what a vote really means in context.
It would be really nice if this could be implemented! A lot of people probably don’t even know that the change impacts the whole website.
I think it would work, at least way better than giving a power to overwrite the whole thing to a single person (even with a reasoning required).
Just like how they can ask their friends to vote for their photos, people could ask others to downvote it if it’s not really a good update.
In fact, Community IDs are working pretty well. People often ask their friends to just agree, but then the others can ask their friends to disagree as well, and usually at the end, it ends up with the most logical side.
Personally I think it would be a good idea for iNat to keep taxon photos as trustworthy as the taxonomy but that’s something that can be discussed separately I guess.
The best system I have ever seen for this kind of thing was the system was invented by the WAZE navigation app. When you have a user LIVE curated database like iNaturalist, it is an absolute MUST that you have some kind of ranking system to determine edit authority levels. This is one area where iNat needs a huge improvement.
In the WAZE system when you first start out, you are a Baby Wazer. You are allowed to" Suggest" live traffic events, such as wrecks, objects on the road, traffic jams and such, but your suggestions are do not become active until they are confirmed by at least two other wazer with a high enough authority ranking. If your suggestions are confirmed, then you gain TRUST. If your suggestions are not confirmed, you lose trust. Once you gain enough trust, you graduate to a Grown Up Wazer. There are five levels of Wazers all the way up to Royal Wazer, at which point your suggestions are immediately implemented without confirmation, and you have the authority to make deeper level edits to traffic information, like changes in speed limits. However, if other high ranked Wazer disagree with your additions enough, you can be down ranked and lose your authority. You must cosnistently add accurate information if you want to keep
There is a reason Google bought Waze for 1.3 Billion only to have access to the user curated data, that is now seamlessly integrated in to Google Maps. Every wonder where all that live traffic data is coming from? It is coming from Royal Wazers, like me.