Not denying that some comments and queries by certain iNatters can be rude and nasty, but I’d like to see some examples of these messages, minus the person’s name and identifying details. Some people are just more blunt than others and although they might not be trying to be rude, it can come across that way by others (I’ve known some academic types like that who were actually not bad people … just oblivious to social graces).
I don’t think there’s a need to post individual messages/comments from iNat on the forum here. There’s certainly a point that some iNatters are more/less rude/courteous than others which I don’t think anyone disputes. The original topic is inherent conflicts though, so it would be best to keep the focus on that aspect.
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And on that note, the main conflict @beepboop described is “inherent” in the sense that it is widespread and recurring: People who work in an environmental job/academia vs people who do not. These two groups tend to have different assumptions about what iNaturalist is for and how it is supposed to work, which is the source of the problem beepboob had.
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Those who make use of iNat data, but don’t actually observe or ID themselves - can assume / presume that - iNat employs scientists to ID, and they should hop to it already!! There are no Christmas elves beavering away at iNat. Just us.
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Some of my biggest gripes as a curator / moderator is this exact attitude by identifiers. It’s almost like the observer is doing them a personal insult by not uploading a microscope images of the exact obscure morphological feature that is needed to identify this rare tribe of organisms…
I find it particularly troublesome when it is done repeatedly, or to a large number of people who often are brand-new to the platform.
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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 need to…” I don’t feel I am being rude but I guess someone might.
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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.
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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 claims can’t be identified without open location data. I have recently begun obscuring all observations of mine if they occur at a location that I deem sensitive for something I’ve observed there, not just whether THAT organism is a sensitive species. Mostly this has come about because certain bad actors have figured out that if they look at unobscured observations by an observer they can deduce the location of something that was obscured. That is, while threatened and endangered species are automatically obscured, species not at risk are left at whatever privacy one chooses. If one knows the date, time, and location of a common species, the obscured species at the same date/time can be deduced. For field sites that are not already protected, I now obscure if another species is there I don’t want people to find. Hence, conflict. Generally, I don’t even try to identify observations that lack location, but observers sometimes want to protect private property (and I respect that at the level of obscured location), but private location can be an ID problem. So levels of conflict between open-sourced data and geo-privacy. Related to this, I recommend ALWAYS obscuring observations on your own home. Otherwise it is too easy to locate a particular cluster of observations in a residential neighborhood as the likely home of that observer.
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You can also used a pinned location
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/elephant-s-eye-on-false-bay
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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.
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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 only observation. I was so sad to see that; I left a comment, but it was probably too late – and definitely too late the help the eggs.
The conflict here is people so focused on identifying – perhaps on their efficient workflow – that they don’t stop to answer a question that isn’t directly an identification question.
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Yes, I try to answer every question the original poster asks. Even better late than never.
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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.
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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 efforts must be put by everyone.
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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 never be acceptable to be rude or insensitive with users over how they are using the platform it is very frustrating to see as the platform is fundamentally a citizen science project i.e. you should want the data you collect to benefit understanding of the biodiversity around you, otherwise you may as well just be saving them to a photo album.
For example a user I regularly come across who posts an enormous quantity of observations many of which are excellent, also uploads a lot of pictures of flowers, trees and shrubs from such a distance / with so little detail there is no way someone could confirm a species level ID. You expect amateurs do to this and it does no harm but I cannot understand why you would create unusable data en masse when instead you could take a quick snap of the leaf / flower / bark to include.
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tiwane said iNat should be fun.
Mark as Reviewed and move on to an obs which is worth your time and effort. If the observer wants an ID, they must play their part too.
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The average iNatter is an amateur and not a serious amateur, either. Getting people to engage in nature is one of iNaturalist’s goals, and sometimes the result is a better example of that than of generating usable data. We learn to expect this kind of thing here.
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The first reason I tell people about why/how I use iNat is as a personal nature journal. Way better platform for that than anything else I’m aware of.
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To remind people of what I wrote, nearly 100 replies ago:
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I view iNat as a huge pile of anecdotes (individual observations) that include useful and not useful items for research. Properly sorted and IDed, many of those anecdotes can collectively become data. I know, some say the plural of anecdote is not data, but others say the opposite. But it takes effort on the part of the researcher to separate the wheat from the chaff.
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