How are place types used on the site?

General
1

This is the list of possible place types a place creator can choose for a community curated place:

Unknown
Aggregate
Airport
Canton
City Building
Colloquial
Commune
Constituency
Continent
Country
County
Delegation
Department Segment
District
Division
Drainage
Estate
Governorate
Historical County
Historical State
Historical Town
Intersection
Island
Land Feature
Local Administrative Area
Local Authority
Miscellaneous
Municipality
Nationality
Open Space
Parish
Poblacion
Point of Interest
Prefecture
Prefecture City
Province
Regency
Region
Republic
Shire
State
Street
Street Segment
Subdivision
Sum
Supername
Territory
Town
Undefined
Unknown
Village block
Zone

Most are very specific, and Unknown is actually listed twice. I always assumed the exact place type chosen was somewhat arbitrary and inconsequential, but someone just suggested that “open space” may be special in that it shows up with standard places on calendar summaries. I don’t really look at my calendar so I can’t really verify this is consistently true. I also can’t find any documentation of this in any of the help or place documents. If it is the case, I would guess it’s an older part of the site that has mostly passed unnoticed.

Is there something special about the “open space” place type? What about other place types? If there is something special, it would be helpful for that to be documented somewhere. That way people can know if they should or should not choose that option on their place.

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Calendar? Calendar summaries? I must have seen the Calendar link at the top of the home page at least 5000 times but never noticed it. I had no idea iNat had calendars. Within a few days I may have forgotten, but for this brief moment I will wonder why it exists.

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I use Calendar to check what I, or another iNatter, observed on that day. Is that iNatter active at all ? Or no obs since …

But calendar summaries ?

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Personally I really like the list of “life firsts” it gives, especially on days I observe a lot. Usually I already know which species are new to me, but its a neat way to also see if its my first time seeing any higher taxa. Nice place for reminiscing on past trips as well

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Yes, that’s true – the calendar shows places with admin_levels (country/state/county-level places, some parks, some towns) and also open spaces.

 if p.blank? || ( p.admin_level.blank? && p.place_type != Place::OPEN_SPACE )

Many years ago, it used to include all places below a certain size threshold, but it was changed with a note that it would now filter out some “for privacy”.

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