We’ve been having an issue lately of observers who disagree with ID’s deleting observations. I know of two in the last week. This is getting annoying since it wastes our time, and they usually throw in an insult before leaving.
Is anyone else having this issue?
Haven’t noticed, but I did recently delete an observation only because I posted it for the sole purpose of teaching a group of people how to use inaturalist.
In these cases, the observers seem to argue, drop an insult, one guy blocked 2 or 3 people.
Yikes! Thankfully I haven’t noticed that. I think if people can’t behave civilly then they shouldn’t be on iNaturalist 
I will occasionally delete an observation if it is an accidental duplicate. If I find it before any one ids it, great.
Yeah I’ve had to do that a couple of times. In those cases, I tagged the identifiers who ID’d the duplicate to be deleted in the other observation with a note.
Some school project or competition to Collect The Whole Set? And You People keep ruining it by telling them they’ve actually just seen the same thing twice?
My first instinct would be to put them on my ignore-in-future list, and/or politely comment on another of their similar obs (that wasn’t disagreed with) noting that behaviour and that if they keep it up nobody will want to play with them … but if they’re sockpuppeting wrong ID’s, then maybe it is better to just keep correcting them until they give up in frustration at their inability to cheat the system - and if the same people keep persisting at it, it flag them and what they are doing to admin. Persistently abusing other users would almost certainly be grounds for action to curtail it, even if deliberately falsifying IDs would be hard to prove.
It’s not a waste of time to keep wrong ID’s from polluting the pool - it’s just not as good a use as it would have been to gain a corrected one.
In the past I’ve posted an observation of a specific, rare tree species, in order to record location of said tree, and had identifiers fail to recognize what the observation was intended to be of, and instead identified it as an adjacent tree, based on a zoomed out photo, rather than the subsequent photos of the specific foliage.
Multiple people then piled onto the same observation and also misidentified it, and when it was pointed out what the observation actually was, they disagreed.
I deleted the observation and reuploaded it with a more informative description, telling people to ignore the adjacent tree, and to focus on the specific intended specimen. This was then appropriately identified and recorded.
If they weren’t actually wrong about the other tree in the image, you could also duplicate the observation (and maybe remove any images no longer applicable to the alternate subject from the original). I’ve done that when people have commented an interest in also identifying and having an observation for something I considered “habitat” in the original observation.
I deleted one observation based on the “piling on” effect. The observation was a drawing of a flowering plant so I can understand why there would be confusion. The issue was that the initial identifications resulted in a RG designation which remained for several years. Then, after a relatively long time, a new group of identifiers started to add different species and genera to my observation. Some of their IDs made sense but the process seemed more like a botanical debate with no resolution. I felt as if my original observation was lost in all the confusion.
Deleting - for a good reason - okay.
But I would flag an insult - that crosses the line.
Blocking people because you disagree with their IDs - is also against guidelines?
Who cares. Just put them on your ignore list, problem solved!
Identifiers - who are also often observers - also do weird things, I have seen all sort of behaviors in a few months only, even those who rank highest in the top observers disagree without justifying their ID but agree on false ID for their friends, don’t answer when tagged, etc.
Deleting observations is just part of curating your data.
It’s most likely not a loss of data, since disagreement means these photos are probably not great/useful enough for research, and anyway I noticed that some specialists active on this platform only post a tiny selection of their observations, the same way some museum collections are not published on Gbif, etc…
Had a user a while ago who blocked me over a disagreement on the identity of an eagle ray in Florida, all while making very passive aggressive comments towards me. Apparently they later deleted that observation after a couple of other more seasoned users came in and IDed it as the same species I had. I really just think it comes down to the maturity of the user and sometimes people just aren’t mature enough to deal with being challenged, which is unfortunate because that is kind of the gist of this site in the first place. Its obnoxious, but its also behavior that won’t get them very far.
they may be busy, with a day job and RL responsibilities.
Although haven’t seen it yet, people might’ve been rude to me on here a few times recently. Someone was rude to me once because I thought a tree could’ve been a weed instead of being deliberately planted and a couple of times, people disagreed with IDs I made without mentioning why. They even ignored me when I tried to ask them why they disagreed so I could learn how to ID better lol
True but getting away with injustice or being rude like what you mentioned is very easy online so they’d likely just come back if they got banned or something. Although that should happen when needed.
Unfortunately, that really isn’t an option. These observations are getting disagreeing ID’s because they’re wrong. We can’t have a GBIF portal and boatloads of papers using the data if it isn’t being curated.
I don’t think it actually is. The wording was more in the realm of strongly discouraging the activity.
The reason for this has been discussed ad nauseam on here. To summarize: an explanation from the observer for their ID is not required (I’ve asked on many observations multiple times for details and had silence), therefore an explanation from the identifier is not required. I’m not going to spend my time including an explanation unless I know it is wanted (many do not care). Some of us have tens or hundreds of thousands of ID’s, you may need to ask twice or dm to get your question noticed.
Inever
This is not my complete quote just a fragment that doesn’t make sense, so your answer is not matching my post, but this is not a problem…
Btw I know it’s not required, the same way it’s not required to not delete your own observations.
What about :
I edited the title to specify what this discussion is about.