Are there any sources used to define them, or are they arbitrarily decided by the users who make them? And can one ask for them to be changed?
Also who can add/change places? I assume curators but I’m not sure.
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Thank you for asking this! My new fraccionamiento’s outlines were set as a place long ago but are erroneous as it continues to grow and I would like someone to
- Expand the borders to reflect the growth (clearly shown on Google maps) and
- Change the geographic terms so it is included in the larger city of Mérida, as it is part of it (also clearly verifiable).
Currently my Observations reflect as if I live in a tiny pueblito, which is adorable but not actually accurate.
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Standard places (country, county, and state level) were imported from GADM. Sometimes they are outdated, but curators can’t fix that. You’d have to ask GADM to update them first, and then staff need to sync with GADM (probably a very intensive process that hasn’t happened in a while).
All other iNat places are considered community curated because they were created by users. Place creators and curators can edit these places, so if you start a flag you can state your problem. Note that in many cases these places are arbitrarily defined and we won’t change something just because you think the Midwest should have different borders (places that big are too large to be edited anyway). But if there are identical places, or places with outdated boundaries, that is often an easy fix.
Just note that if you want to update a boundary, you should have an updated KML handy.
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I was just about to create a flag, but then I looked this up and as it is so far out of my skillset, I will just continue to live in a pueblito until such time as someone with more skills moves in, I guess.
Or is there a way to see who created a place? Maybe the faster way is to have the original creator adjust the boundaries? (People rarely move here.)
Just today I edited a place I created. Santa Rosa Junior College Main Campus didn’t have a place, and friend asked me to make a place of it, so I do so (quickly). But now I’ve been asked to organize a BioBlitz there, so I used mymaps.google.com to more carefully click dots around the edges of campus, exported that as a .kml, and updated the place. Excluding the roughly twenty minutes I spent clicking around the complex edges of campus on the map, this all took about five minutes. https://www.inaturalist.org/places/santa-rosa-junior-college-main-campus
with so many places included in OpenStreetMap these days, it’s a shame to not use OSM boundaries to make a KML file (if more authoritative boundaries can’t already be found in other sources). ex.: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/isnt-there-thasos-island-as-a-location-on-inaturalist/57955/2.
I am not ashamed. Often times the most efficient way to do something one does very rarely is the method one already knows.