I’ve noticed an institutional account that is posting photos from many different users under a single account. This seems a bit outside the intended use of iNaturalist, where individuals typically have their own accounts and can then contribute to a project.
Some concerns I’ve observed:
There’s no clear consistency or accountability since multiple contributors are bundled into one account.
The account doesn’t respond to questions on iNaturalist itself; instead, they direct people to email an institutional address.
Many of the observations are of cultivated plants, and all are set to “obscured.” While both of these are allowed, it makes curation and community engagement more difficult.
From my reading of the guidelines, this seems to go beyond the “gray area” for group or shared accounts. My question is: what is the appropriate action here, if any? Should this be flagged, reported, or is it considered acceptable use of the platform?
I’d appreciate any clarification on how situations like this are typically handled.
Actually, looking at it further, I think it’s important to mention the organization I’m talking about. This organization has about 100 accounts functioning in the same way. If I did the math right, that’s thousands of users lumped into 100 accounts.
There’s an org doing something similar in my area. They’re using inat as an educational tool in some way. With what appears to be varying levels of success. They submit a LOT of cultivated garden plants. But also some solid observations. I submit IDs on some of them sometimes. The massive amount of garden plants they submit gets annoying and the lack of engagement with the content they submit is definitely irritating. But other than that, I don’t have a problem with what they do.
One thing that handling it this way avoids is putting too much agency onto the kids (I have no idea what ages these kids are) to put stuff onto inat themselves. Which has its own problems with abandoned accounts, “joke” observations, low quality photos (where you can’t tell much of anything), and so on. At least by doing it this way, the org(s) in my area are able to filter the content that gets submitted and ensure the submissions otherwise follow guidelines.
All good points. This organization (I believe we’re talking about the same one) also incentivizes observations with a point system that results in winning prizes of monetary value. This is a really cool organization, but I think the actions cause some conflicts that compromise the trust system and place a burden on identifiers.
Maybe. But I don’t see this as all that different than the library incentive programs to get kids reading. This one gets kids outside and observing nature. I think I’d prefer to see more platform engagement from whoever it is that handles uploads, though.