How did the observation of Gerald the Muskrat go viral on inaturalist?

It started with a school kid photographing the creature, then misidentified it. A surprisingly large number of school kids “agreed” with one another on the incorrect ID, and other kids posted different incorrect IDs, until there was a huge stack of wrong IDs and only one ID was was roughly correct.

So then, in order to get the correct ID to show, a really large number of us who knew what the creature was had to put in the correct ID, so as to overwhelm all those incorrect IDs, and get the algorithm to show the right one.

So extra people were called in to put a correct ID on it.

That is how the whole thing got started.

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