I think bc some people might use iNat as a way to track what extinct species they have seen? so I am guessing that allowing ppl to make H. neanderthalensis obs is for the ppl who like taking a pic of a taxidermy passender pigeon or dinosaur fossil and uploading it? thats my only guess, is that if someone’s at a museum and wants to record bones or whatever.
Lovely take on iNat’s sole purpose: to connect the public to the nature around them(typo fixed). Every random observation is special to someone and a lucky few will get to share it with the world. In exchange iNat gets a really good tweet.
I suggest you get in touch with @tiwane for further questions on this message first. He might have some specialist knowledge ;)
I don’t think any further thought was put into it aside from the fact that it’s part of iNat’s taxonomy, is an active taxon, and is thus selectable as an identification.
As a result of this discussion iNat stuff deleted extinct human species from the tree, so their IDs can’t be used for cyberbullying. It’s kind of odd solution that resolves nothing (any non-H.sapiens ID could be offensive under someone’s photo and seen as cyberbullying), but rather creates some problems. For many it will now looks like iNat is promoting some marginal creationist theories, that all fossil humans are actually the same species as modern humans or something (there is a lot of other extinct taxa, including other extinct hominids, and it’s unclear without reading certain comments why only extinct humans absent). There was an educational component with these extinct humans in the taxonomical tree and such extinct taxa is clearly allowed by the curator guide https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#extinct
It could be appropriate (and perhaps even right) only if as the next step all extinct taxa, except modern extinctions (after 1500 AD), will be deleted and not allowed any more, otherwise it’s a total mess, far less experts will want to work on a taxonomical tree that looks like this, count me out for sure.
What should be actually done here, if anything, is observations with social photos should be forbidden and deleted on sight. It would also save a lot of money for iNat and more people could want to donate if there would be less trashy observations (some people don’t want to donate on storage of 200,000 observations with social photos of people, pet-dogs and pet-cats).
Well, good news is, of the 92,368 human observations with photos as of this writing, about half have CC licensed photos (42,343 of them are CC-BY-NC alone) so amazon is paying to host those. They should also never be re-indexed due to taxon changes, and probably aren’t exported for scientific purposes very often. My guess would be inat is spending maybe less than $50 per year hosting human observations, which is quite insignificant in the scheme of things (staff time spent talking about these observations on the forum is surely worth way more than $50).
Cats are very commonly feral or quasi-feral all over the world and a huge issue to track ecologically, well in line with inat’s purpose. Dogs are rarely feral in most of the US, but more often elsewhere.
I checked, and it is true that every extinct human species except Neandrathals had at least a handful of observations which were not transparent jokes/bullying or museum specimens (though they still weren’t ‘recent’). On the other hand, I’m not sure whether a picture of a rock on the ground with some tool marks on it can really be definitively ID’d as a particular human species, so my feeling would be genus homo is probably an adequate place to put those observations anyway.
I was talking only about ones marked “captive”, most of those are just some pet sitting on a sofa, for sure nobody wants to track those ecologically.
It’s not the point, the point is in inconsistency and how this inconsistency can be seen by many. Same can be said about nearly all other extinct taxa, but they’re allowed and not removed. Very few of those observations, if any, are actually useful. If there is no desire to store that trash and to deal with related problems then all extinct taxa should be removed and the curator guide should be rewritten, so everything would be consistent and in order.
I don’t see how the removal of extinct humans is an improvement, it makes the taxonomy odd without stopping bullying, I would personally think “homo” is more likely to be a bullying ID than “neanderthal”, and in certain contexts non human primates or other animals are probably more offensive things to ID a human as than any species of homo
Removing taxa to stop bullying is destined to be futile because the notes section or comments can be used for any name calling a bully can think of regardless of what IDs are available
I agree with you, and with @igor117. If people are trying to bully, removing extinct humans won’t stop them. Think of all the other words used to insult people-- and we don’t want to remove other animals (cow, rat, dog, etc) just bc some people compare fellow humans to those animals.
Personally, I am disappointed that extinct human species cannot be observed anymore. Many people make obs of extinct species, and although those species aren’t here anymore, I feel like they are still important. Just a few months ago, someone made an observation of basilosaurus bones, and it was cool to see even a picture, and I got to talk to the person about the bones. Won’t the people who make fossil obs be disappointed that they can’t use the proper species? I don’t know how many people on iNat have access to those early human species, but I am sure someone does. Personally, I don’t make any human obs, or any fossil homonid obs, but I still think that they are (or were) still species that interact(ed) with the rest of the world.
So, to end this post, as an iNat user, I think we should have the ability to ID things as neanderthal/early humans. I feel like whatever rules are made, there will always be ppl who mean harm on the internet, and they will still find ways to be, to put it bluntly, jerks. I think that the community should be the ones to flag innappropriate obs, and just keep an eye on species we know people use as a way to bully. No-one should be police-ing anyone else, that will cause other problems, but like any other community, we should just keep an eye on things and make sure no-one is misusing the app. There are more well-intending people than there are trolls. And every other platform faces issues with bullying and poor behavior. Removing species won’t change that.
If I missed anything, let me know, but I think we should be able to use the extinct human species in IDs.
I deleted the part of my original post responding to the young earth creationist thing before I even submitted, because I got a little riled up about how odd the claim felt and I didn’t want to regret what I said in the morning. I don’t see how the change could possibly be perceived have anything to do with creationism. I think that statement is a distraction and it is better to keep the discussion about the change focussed on how it affects user engagement.
I’ll stay on my opinion that how it may look in context of some marginal theories is an important thing that can impact views of some people, even if only few. There are many kids and people with only basic knowledge in natural sciences who may only start to form their opinions on such things. What can they see by browsing a taxonomical tree on iNat? There are dinosaurs, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, all well-known megafauna of Pleistocene, Australopithecus, modern humans and… no other humans who were the best-known representatives of the same period?.. It could bring some unnecessary thoughts on why is it so and is it means something. The most logical explanation that fits this situation is the creationist theories, because that extinct humans were deleted to fight cyberbullying makes no sense and nobody would never guess it. And someone may think, “oh, maybe these theories really make sense if iNat presents it that way”. To be clear, I’m not saying that it was done to promote such stuff, I’m sure it’s not the case, but that some people may think so.
I think the fact that humans are nested in under primates is probably good enough to combat that particular issue - we also don’t include the vast majority of ancestral species of other taxa that are known from the fossil record.
Personally I’d be fine with removing any species that is only known from the fossil record. Considering that iNat is specifically for “recent” signs of life, things that have been extinct for more than a few hundred years are pretty irrelevant to purposes.
It’s obviously not a scientifically accurate compendium of all fossil taxa, but it’s closer in status to a popular science book that covers fossil biodiversity. In such a book you don’t have to mention every fossil species we know, but some best-known and most important ones are must have, you just can’t omit them. And ancestral species of modern humans are first ones among these must-haves. If you’re adding any fossil species you must have those. If you’re deleting them then you’re deleting all.
Also, some people put effort to create those taxa on iNat and it’s still perfectly allowed by the current iNat guidelines. If you want to delete something that is perfectly allowed by the rules you should change the rules first, because otherwise it’s basically a despotism where rules are only for some categories of users.
While I don’t think human obvs should be removed entirely, something definitely needs to be done. Especially since iNat includes location data! That’s a huge doxing and cyberstalking risk. You can’t exactly tell if a post was made with malicious intent or not. Even when a person is posing for the camera there’s no telling whether they knew the photo would end up online with exact location data displayed. Imo obscuring location isn’t enough, the location data should be hidden entirely. The only reason to attatch location info that i can see is someone using them to mark places they’ve explored.
Maybe a rule only allowing experienced users to post humans?
Personal experience: a while back I hit “next” while doing IDs and suddenly found myself staring at a picture of my own face. After a brief heart attack, I figured out that one of the middle school students whose observations I had been correcting had stolen it from my linkedin profile and uploaded it. Not sure what the motivation was. Fortunately staff were able to deal with it quickly and it was removed, but it was still creepy as hell.
Now that’s clear-cut case of copyright infringement, since it was your photo on your profile. I gather that the concern on this thread is to have a way to deal equally quickly with photos that are not copyright infringement.
Yes, that was my intent in starting the thread, to propose that images that are problematic but not copyright infringement be dealt with as quickly as copyright infringement is currently dealt with