I’ve been noticing a lot of DQA abuse lately - is there any way to see a particular user’s DQA votes to see if there’s a pattern going on?
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I think this is important info for a curator to have access to, and I have also noticed what I suspect may be DQA abuse, but I do not think curators currently have this access
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What is DQA?
“Data Quality Assessment” - it’s the section way down at the bottom of the observation page (or the Data Quality tab in Identify mode).
Any user can thumbs-up or thumbs-down the various entries, and if the downvotes exceed the up votes on anything, the observation becomes casual grade.
However, voting in the DQA doesn’t generate a notification for the observer, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to see all the votes generated by a particular user either.
Lately I’ve been noticing more retaliatory voting, for instance where someone has an observation flagged for copyright violation goes and downvotes a bunch of the observations from the person who flagged them, to make them casual. Or purely disruptive ones, like mass voting zoo animals as “wild”.
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To my knowledge no, and there’s not even a way to flag the vote. I think voting history and the ability to flag a vote are crucial for curators to be able to actually deal with DQA abuse, which is pretty darn common.
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as far as i know, there currently are not great ways for regular folks to filter observations by particular user’s data quality assessment (DQA) activity. the best you can do is to get a set of observations and then parse those observations on your end to do your own secondary filter by votes by that user. that process might not be too bad to do if you know you’re dealing with a particular taxon or place without a ton of observations. but it wouldn’t work well if there’s no way to substantially narrow the primary set within which you apply that secondary filtering.
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I am also worried about some similar weird use of DQA.
I’m not a curator, and this is only a stopgap measure:
Search for observations IDd by user that are casual.
You might be able to narrow by taxon or the like to get a better feel for a pattern.
Message me offline if I’m not making this clear.
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Oh, I know this thing! Thanks for clarifying.
Oh and that isn’t even a guarantee you’ll find these users by searching for their ID’s, I’ve seen some users that only add a vote, so no ID to tie them to an observation.
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I’ve created a feature request for this, since there doesn’t seem to be any way to do it currently: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/allow-curators-to-view-an-accounts-dqa-votes-and-allow-for-flagging-and-hiding-of-dqa-votes-and-annotations/57188
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