Hey folks, just a reminder to please stay on topic - this isn’t really the place to discuss the ethics and legal aspects of photo exhibits. Please remember to stay on topic - if you want to discuss something like that, please send a direct message.
I agree with @sedgequeen in that we do often assume motivations of others (which I think is natural, we’re human) but that unless we ask them we are in the end only making assumptions and it’s good to remember that. It’s also why the Community Guidelines ask that we all assume others mean well.
You can always ask someone in a respectful way. Just like there’s a diverse natural world, there’s a huge diversity of people using iNat, some of whom are motivated in ways we might not have ever thought of.
Since I am now interested in pollinators, flowering weeds are important to me. Any insect pollinated weed, even non-native invasives, has worked out a relationship with the pollinators, or they would not be successful. Besides, it is fun to id a weed in its native Europe that I learned here in the US, and I can check the weeds that grow next to my car to make sure my “eye” is accurate.
This is also the approach I tend to take. I noticed that you said you sometimes break it – is there a common reason why? For me it’s when I’m really curious about an observation and add a higher-level identification (if it’s not higher than any of the current identifications) as an alternative to following it.
i don’t identify to subspecies except in very rare cases like really obvious ones or ones where one of the subspecies is native and the other is not. I do not ID subspecies by location and if someone else does so on my observation i don’t ‘agree’ to the ID. I don’t block it out either, but i have no intention of doing so myself.
Why do I sometimes add an identification above the species level that isn’t an improvement? Sometimes for a reason, sometimes for no obvious reason but I just felt like agreeing. The most usual reason is that the ID to genus (for example) was difficult or the observer expressed doubt about it and I wanted to add encouragement. I did a lot of ID’s of this kind for student observations when I was using iNaturalist in teaching a plant identification class.
sometimes i use those agreeing IDs as a way of noting that i reviewed the observation but didn’t have a better ID and thought it might not be possible to get one
I hope this isn’t too off topic! Sorry if it is not the main point of the thread… I haven’t completely absorbed what’s fine and what’s topic hijacking on the iNat forums… if it is off topic please be gentle when you let me know and I will be more careful in the future.
I think identifiers could mitigate this by sequencing the observations randomly instead of by time. That’s what I (a very novice identifier, please note - I don’t want to claim expertise I don’t possess! But this is a very useful feature.) I do wish there were easier access to this feature. It would also be nice to have an option to limit the number of observations by one individual in a given “batch” — of course for all I know that feature exists. iNaturalist’s options are so rich I never feel like I know them all!
It doesn’t seem like “spamming” to post a lot of observations at once and/or of the same organism/type of organism… 1000 of the literal same photo would be inappropriate (and most likely malicious). 1000 of the same taxon is a survey of that taxon! :) (For example, @sedgequeen I enjoyed your recent post on heat damaged trees)
I have read this post carefully. I can see why some people reacted strongly, but I urge them to give it another go. It is not a criticism of any contributors. It is an attempt to get us to stop carping about the ‘bad’ behaviour of others (heaven knows, I do too much of that in normal life), and just use iNaturalist the way we want to.
Interesting thread to read. The initial sentiment is a healthy one for all online interactions.
For me, “observation” leaderboards are fun (I’ve uploaded the most Macrotera, yay!) and “identification” leaderboards are a small source of dread. It’s cool to see my name there, but I don’t want anyone thinking my advice is expert.
One of the ways I found I can contribute to iNat is by getting plants to RG or finding wrong IDs, and the most efficient way for me to learn and review a genus is to go species by species, because seeing the same taxa over and over makes the wrong IDs stick out. For example, I just finished all the pages of Cercocarpus ledifolius and now I’m the top identifier of mountain mahogany trees - yikes!
I post the same species myself sometimes. One example: I submitted the same pair of Caspian Terns in the exact same spot on a local Wetland for 8 or 9 days. Because I have never seen them stay that long, and conditions on the wetland are very different from the usual, I wanted to document how long they stayed. I know my memory isn’t going to do it so grateful for the iNat memory!