Human Observations with Wild/Captive/Introduced/Native statuses

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I just noticed this today, but why on Observations · iNaturalist are humans marked as “Wild” and considered “Introduced” in the US? It seems wrong for many reasons.
Is there a way to remove that?

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Good question.

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Flag it on the taxon page. All ‘humans’ are Casual by definition on iNat.

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wild =/= verifiable
casual =/= not wild
Given that iNat has two possibilities (wild or captive/cultivated), it seems less problematic for humans to be sorted under “wild” than under “captive” (while still remaining casual). I don’t know if it would be possible for them to be treated as neither “wild” nor “captive”, but if it is, I doubt it can be resolved with a flag.

I agree that it is inappropriate for humans to be assigned “introduced” status, regardless of where in the world this is. I also don’t think they should be assigned “native” status. Better to not include an establishment means at all.

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Flagged it. This might need to be done through more than a flag though.
You can literally separate “Wild” Observations · iNaturalist humans and “Captive” Observations · iNaturalist humans.
Grouping human observations into “Wild” and “Captive” is not appropriate on or off Inat, and is dehumanizing.

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We were asked not to choose Wild or Not Wild for humans.
They are all Casual due to iNat’s decision.

Introduced or Native should not be an available option.

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Some users have learned that “not wild” makes observations casual and therefore they use it for any observation that they think should not be eligible for RG (duplicates, bad data, etc.). I think this is probably the reason why observations of humans get marked as such – either the users do not realize that observations of humans are always casual, or they use it on observations that have been incorrectly ID’d as something other than humans (for example, artificial flowers) to take them out of “needs ID” before the community ID is human. I doubt it is intended as dehumanizing in most cases, but I agree that it is problematic nonetheless.

It seems like it ought to be possible to simply deactivate the DQA button on observations with a community ID of humans, the same way other buttons are deactivated in cases where they do not apply, or the way that there are no applicable annotations for humans. But this would be a task for the programmers and not curators.

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I moved the above posts to a new, separate topic and titled as best as I could since they weren’t directly related to the original thread which focused on human observations in schools.

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From an anthropological perspective – humans are introduced in the New World, Europe, and Asia, albeit self-introduced and some anthropologists argue we are domesticated, again self-domesticated.

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Thanks @yayemaster. I left a supporting comment there (https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/764416).

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Many observations of humans are marked as captive because they are actually observations of manmade objects. One person sees a plant in a pot, marks it not wild and moves on. Another person realizes the plant is actually plastic and identifies it as Homo sapiens.

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Homo sapiens (Human) from Long Island, Massapequa, NY, US on June 3, 2020 at 04:39 PM by Robert Levy · iNaturalist
But is it appropriate to call all human observations wild and captive at the same time?

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One person sees a plant in a pot, marks it not wild and moves on. Another person realizes the plant is actually plastic and identifies it as Homo sapiens .

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