I am seeing many observations, many of which in urban areas, that display a very imprecise position. I mean with a radius often exceeding 1 km and sometimes being larger than 10 km. I think that, on the one hand, there can be good reasons not to keep the gps switched on or to use different camera a…

I think that was one of the requests, though I know one was declined at one point. There was another that was the same idea that was not directly declined, I think.

[image] anon83178471: FWIW, as somebody who obscures everything (I’m rooting for an option to obscure only the date, since my current system sometimes feels like overkill, but better safe than sorry.), Interesting! For my purposes I feel like I more often annoyed at the fact that I can’t unob…

[image] Italopithecus: It’s not a “data users vs data uploaders” matter. As far as I am concerned, t’s mainly to make iNat as far as possible a depiction of reality. Isn’t it? There is no site policy that says uploaders – or identifiers – have to have researchers’ needs in mind. Different peo…

[image] wildskyflower: knowing at least the week of the year has a pretty significant scientific value, whereas knowing the exact gps coordinates is nice and often makes IDing easier but is often not really all that scientifically necessary These are things I could give for a lot of observati…

I also would like like an option to unobscure date/time, but I disagree that [image] wildskyflower: Part of it is that I feel like for a lot of things (like phenology) knowing at least the week of the year has a pretty significant scientific value, whereas knowing the exact gps coordinates is n…

Yeah for sure, I’m just imagining studies like these where location hardly matters but the exact date does: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.2456 https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-leaf-and-bloom-dates In the mountains phenology does only work…

[image] cthawley: Phenology is certainly important, but many studies aren’t looking at phenology at all and may not even consider year, so a large proportion of data uses would be unaffected by temporal obscuration. I think that is entirely dependent on what group of organisms is under consid…

I’m fairly new to iNat. I take photos with my camera phone (location services turned off) and then upload the observations later through the phone app. When entering the location via the map interface, it’s not obvious that the circle that makes the ‘crosshairs’ is indicating the level of accuracy o…

You can also see that on my iPhone, the iPhone interface places a bar at the bottom of screen that almost totally covers up the accuracy level.

The circle looks very different on the website as I use it and there are no crosshairs, which is fine with me. Interesting how different iNaturalist can be depending on how we access it.

How to encourage users to provide a more precise position

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Deliberately posting false or inaccurate information General	64	4841	July 9, 2023
Obscure It or "Fudge It"? General	114	2961	May 17, 2026
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Huge "Accuracy" Circles General	43	1197	January 24, 2026

How to encourage users to provide a more precise position

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