Description of problem: I noticed a bunch of an observer’s observations were suddenly “casual” by the observer, even though they were wild organisms. When I brought this to the observer’s attention, they were confused, as they had no idea why this had happened, and they told me it affected 11 days’ worth of observations. They fixed it using batch edit, and they think it may have occurred sometime today. Most of the users’ observations were uploaded via the Android app, so idk if it was something there or something with the website
If the observations were marked casual by iNat (as opposed to by another iNat user) it is generally because the observations are of a species that is mostly not wild in that area. As you noted, it’s easily dealt with.
This is in place because people not marking cultivated plants appropriately is a significant issue for various reasons.
I would assume it’s not the same situation, given the linked observation where they first noticed it was of a tree frog in a national forest. Particularly relevant as when looking at that species, there are only 37 captive observations on iNat, and the observation is 200km+ away from the closest captive point - which I don’t think would influence getting an automatic vote from iNat (something I’ve only seen in close locale to zoos with that sp, etc for fauna).
Edit: Meant that to be a reply to the first response, rather than yours!
While going through casual observations and asking about apparently wild things marked “not wild” by the observer, I’ve run into what seem to be similar cases. I remember getting at least one response indicating that it happened without the observer’s knowledge while uploading using a mobile phone app and affected a good number of observations from that observer. It seemed for some reason everything uploaded over a certain time period was marked “not wild” by default. Not sure if this was user error or some bug in the app. Unfortunately since it was a while ago I don’t remember details as in which observer or observations were affected and can’t provide any links.
Hmm - have also noticed a small number of apparently wild observations being marked as not wild recently for no obvious reason. Its small, but its more than in the past.
These were all species that are natively found in the area, as well as ones I IDed myself before they suddenly became casual. I spoke with the person further, and they stated that they were attempting to batch edit to obscure some observations. During that, the batch edit timed out so maybe it has to do something with that? They did say they “do not remember that I clicked “not wild” but there is always a chance” during that batch edit.
Probably random users doing that, sometimes random people do that to my observations because they’re probably new to INaturalist and mis-clicked something