I’ve spent a fair bit of time recently inactivating what seems like an endless stream of ungrafted taxa that are long-extinct fossils that keep getting imported, yet no observations added. From previous discussion (thanks @bouteloua):
As cool as archaeological and geological finds are, iNaturalist’s focus is on users sharing their observations of recent, wild organisms and it’s not really the place for uploading observations of other things. To make it an ever expanding platform for archaeological finds, artifacts, geology, etc., would blur the focus of the site and make it significantly more difficult to run. A few fossil uploads here and there (properly marked as not recent evidence) are fine, but it would be better to find or create other platforms specific to those types of finds (eg rockd.org rather than shoehorn them onto iNaturalist. iNaturalist code is open source so it could be theoretically adapted to create such platforms.
So clearly we don’t necessarily discourage fossil taxa. What’s the best way to deal with them when they get imported and end up ungrafted? Is it acceptable to leave them dangling in the ‘ungrafted taxa’ category?
I don’t think things should be left in the active but ungrafted pool. Personally, I just inactivate extinct taxa if they don’t fit nicely in the tree already. And sometimes even if they do if someone is obviously trolling.
I do think if you spend the time to see what they are and determine they are extinct, then mark them as such and inactivate them. Otherwise another curator is going to come along and just replicate the same research.
I just did another 20-30 of them this morning (I guess adding all the extinct taxa named after Lord of the Rings characters was too tempting for someone), it is getting frustrating to say the least to keep doing this. I wish there were a way to determine who is adding these. It is obvious they are not paying any attention to the taxa they are adding as they are simply getting inactivated and hidden, yet no complaints.
I’ve inactivated something well over 100 today (for every one in the list there are and can be multiple child species that have to be done too in most cases). I dont know how many @jwidness or others have dealt with.
They’ve added over 1,000 taxa today most just for the apparent humour of the name. They basically are just entering every funny or pop culture reference they can think of and adding any name EoL finds.
I have to admire their persistence, I spent over 8 hours cleaning them today and they are still going strong.
There have been multiple extant ones. It is actually part of the problem, if you dont clear out the extinct ones you cant find the extant ones( or ones added by other people legitimately trying to add something to use) to fix because the list is limited to 100 entries with no scrolling function.
And they’ve simply restarted again this morning. Probably reading this thread and having a good laugh about it too.
This currently returns 227 active ungrafted taxa, and the most recent ones appear at the bottom of the list. To see only the really recent ones, you can play around with &id_above= and set it to something like 1100000 or higher.
Any possibility you can auto-inactivate their taxa that haven’t grafted? It would be nice to be able to find imports that other people made and want to use.
