I just read a huge comment thread on iNaturalist. There is a basic internal conflict in iNaturalist, which I currently see expressed in three ways: Engagement vs Data Observers vs Identifiers Moderation (play nice) vs Curation (taxonomy) I actually see all of this as more of a feature than a bug,…

Are they definitely rude, rather than just short? For example, if someone identifies a Notonecta hanging from the water surface, I might comment “Need to see the dorsal pattern for a species id.” I don’t spend time padding it out with “That is a very good photo but unfortunately in this instance we …

Oh, no, you definitely see some pretty entitled rudeness. Comments like “whatever possessed you to identify this to species?” directed at people with fewer than 20 observations, for example.

I don’t think this has been brought up before (I apologize if it has), but another conflict is the desire/need for location to be open/accurate by identifiers and the need/concern related to privacy in observations. I came up against this recently with an observation I obscured that an identifier cl…

[image] petezani: I recommend ALWAYS obscuring observations on your own home You can also used a pinned location https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/elephant-s-eye-on-false-bay

Obscuring is OK, though it does conflict with some people’s needs, but thank you, thank you for not using “private” and leaving us clueless about location.

I have come across an observation of a bird nest (initial ID of “birds”) where the observer wrote notes about finding the nest abandoned and asking, “Is there anything we can do to save these poor eggs?” And, years later, no sign that anyone had interacted with the observation at all. It was their o…

Yes, I try to answer every question the original poster asks. Even better late than never.

This is a situation where sites like Facebook are probably the better go-to resource for time-sensitive questions. I certainly don’t expect rapid responses to questions on iNat although it’s nice when it happens.

Conflicts are unavoidable but I am pretty sure that we can get to good compromises foor each of the couples you have mentioned. These compromises can be beneficial for the iNat users who are not interested in collecting data, as well as for those who are here just to make research. Of course some e…

As someone who works in academia and conservation who is quite new to iNaturalist although I have used other citizen science platforms extensively, I struggle to understand users who post large quantities of observations that are very unlikely to ever be research grade. Whilst obviously it would nev…

Inherent conflicts on iNaturalist

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Overzealous Identification General question	113	15443	September 6, 2019
What iNaturalist is for General	49	6573	September 7, 2019
Paper about inaturalist The benefits of contributing to the citizen science platform iNaturalist as an identifier General	67	3967	January 8, 2023
Observers deleting observations when identifiers disagree with them General	125	3666	October 27, 2024
Farewell ignorance General	37	2738	July 16, 2020

Inherent conflicts on iNaturalist

Related topics