Sort of. I still don’t like it b/c even though the attribution is irrelevant, it’s also inaccurate. Furthermore, my issue isn’t just with ownership over the work and giving credit where credit is due. I view iNat as a way to encourage and facilitate behaviors that create and strengthen relationships with non-human organisms, not as a way to collect records of organismal occurrence. I care about the latter, but I strongly believe it should be a byproduct of individual encounters with these organisms. Posting content by other people is not an activity that gets you outside and having such in-person encounters. I realize looking at a picture and taking the care to curate it is also a way to form these relationships, and I also realize not everyone is equally capable of getting outside and having a physical and more personal encounter, hence the tolerance of this kind of stuff, but I don’t like thinking about iNat as a tool to build a collection. It should be a tool to help direct and focus your attention.
Again, currently a gray area, but something I would tolerate, and would like to see better-facilitated by the software.
I should say that we on staff have talked at length about various changes to facilitate some of these use-cases, like multi-person observations, the notion of “stewards” to manage obs on behalf of people not on iNat or iNat users who have passed away, etc., but the importance-to-effort ratio has never seemed great enough. I should also say that the idea of trying to make occurrence data from arbitrary images on the web is an idea I find interesting (machine-assisted crowdsourced aggregation, de-duping, identification, etc.), it’s just not what I think iNat should be used for.