Intentionally wrong ID‘s

I am sorry if I repeat something that is already said herein the forums, but I am a bit exasperated. I do not know what to do with ID’s which may be termed as intentionally wrong. There is one user who is uploading photos of lichens, many of them belonging to the groups that cannot be identified to species or even genus without microscopy or chemical examination, or both. Besides, many of the photos are too blurry to be identified to any taxonomic level. When I tried to downgrade the IDs to a realistic level, he often just changed into another name in the same genus (equally unindentifiable from a photo). I tried to explain, then tried to ask why he is doing that and tried to show that by adding intentional misidentifications he also affects AI tool, which is already not so well-working for lichenized fungi. He never responded to any questions and just hid my comments. What can be done in such cases? Or should I just ignore him?

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If the person seems unresponsive to polite guidance on making accurate/reasonable identifications, and these are their own observations, I would probably lean toward tagging in or privately messaging other users who can help and let the situation get resolved through the community identification system.

If a person is making intentional misidentifications on other people’s observations, it needs to be addressed more firmly, potentially by a curator or staff.

As far as “he…hid my comments” – the only people who can hide comments are curators and site staff.

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You can also email URLs of examples to help@inaturalist.org if you don’t want to publicly discuss the specific user and we can take a look.

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Thank you both, @bouteloua and @tiwane for the advice. The person in question is misidentifying his own observations (as far as I know, because I only check lichen OB’s in certain territories where I know lichens well or at least have fragmentary knowledge, and he is travelling extensively). I will try to engage somebody to take part in the action, though there are too few people here who know Arctic lichens in general and Icelandic lichens specifically. I don’t want to discuss the person in public - the situation has not reached such really bad level, but if the community impact fails, I will send URLs to the helpdesk.

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Depending on where in the world this is, also worth checking if the observer actually speaks English.

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Native English speaking :-)

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@jurga_li Just thought that this thread, especially @jdmore’s comment, might be of interest to people reading this post: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ability-for-curators-to-delete-other-users-comments-vs-hide/548

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