Multiple Places for the same property?

General
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I was thinking of creating an iNat “Place” for my work site. However, a private citizen has already created a “Point of Interest” using the name of my work site. Their geographical boundary is crude and only contains a portion of our property and much property that isn’t ours. I have a kml file of our exact property boundaries to use. Will it be an issue to create another place with the same exact name as the previous “Place?” Can a “Place” boundaries be modified after a Place has been created? Can a place be deleted by the creator? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

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probably the best thing is to send a message to the creator of the existing place with a crude boundaries to see how they’re using the place and whether they would be okay with updating the place to reflect your more precise boundaries. (it’s possible the boundaries are created crudely on purpose.)

if it makes sense to update the existing place with your boundaries, then you could probably do one of 3 things:

  1. send the KML to the place’s creator, and have that person use the KML to update the boundaries
  2. send the KML to a site curator, and have the curator use the KML to update the boundaries.
  3. create a new place using the KML, and then merge your place into the existing place, keeping the boundaries of your new place.

if if makes more sense to keep the existing place, then just create your own new place.

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Thanks. By “Site Creator” do you mean some type of iNat admin who would do it from the back end? As another alternative, can the other person change the name of their site? From a technical standpoint can iNat have two Places with the same exact name? Would it matter if they had the same name but of a different type? For example same name, but one was a Point of Interest and one an Open Space?

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site admins (iNat staff) can help with these request, but i was talking about curators, who are volunteers with extra privileges who help to deal with some of the more complex things in the system. the people page (https://www.inaturalist.org/people) lists curators at the bottom, and i think some of the moderators on the forum here (https://forum.inaturalist.org/g/forum_moderators) are also curators who have experience dealing with places.

if you determine that having a curator make a change is the best path forward, then you can reach out to one of them, and they’re usually more than willing to help.

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You can see a Place’s creator by looking in the lower left corner on the place page:

image

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