I’m working on a data collect from old collection specimens without labels nor informations.
The main idea is that some specimens can bring some interesting observations for species without relevant informations, even if they are not from the wild, so without date nor place.
Some specimens I got to identify are sometime precisely related to species descriptions articles.
My problem is that as it’s not observation from the wild, it can’t match the research quality level - what’s obviously logical - even if totaly relevant for a spp. without observations.
Others like @thebeachcomber understand this way better than I do, but I’ll share my two cents.
You make a good point. Don’t we want these precious photos on iNat, in order to help train the CV?
The thing is, we have to consider the purpose of the platform. It is not intended to be a repository of nature information, although over time, it does de facto become that sort of thing.
It is intended to record your personal engagement with nature. The rules that support that purpose, also make these precious photos casual. iNat cannot be all things to all people.
Are these specimens from your own collection? Or are they an old collection that you’ve inherited? If the latter, unless the species were particularly rare or have no/very few images online, I would perhaps consider depositing them elsewhere if they’re effectively missing all the important metadata like location and date
Many specimens I own are from old Museum exhibitions collection, not used for exhibitions due to their bad conditions.
They mainly come from gift with some really interesting species, but not the whole box. As their conditions really not quality needed for exhibitions, no time is allowed to identification, and many specimens end in rejected boxes.
From time to time, the collection manager allow me to take specimens that will never be examinated for my own use, so I can take them home for my own use and collection.
I - as a hobby - like to identify those specimens. The vast majority are common or rare, but well know and well documented. But it happen from time to time to get one quite unusual, that need far more precise identification.
I compare them with well identified specimens we have in the collection, and when I can’t find true match, here start thé fun.
Basically you can photograph and enter this old collection of museum rejects as observations and best to mark them as casual as the correct data needed is unknown so they don’t take up much time of the active identifiers. We don’t have enough people identifying as it is.
I agree that these specimens are interesting. However, since you are only observing them as part of a collection given to you, you would either need to upload with the time/location that you are seeing them at (ie, present day in the lab) and then downvote wild (those insects didn’t intend to be there) OR you could upload with no date/location and just leave a note in the description describing the situation. I It might be good to add a generic note that you can use for all observations like this describing the origin of the specimens as you did above to help other users.
I think this is a fairly simple question. IF it were your collection, and IF you have collection locations and dates, the uploads would be fine for iNat, but if it is a 2nd-hand collection, from someone/somewhere else, with rare exceptions these data don’t belong on iNat. And in the absence of collection localities or dates, the specimens have very little value for the fundamental purposes of iNat. To reiterate from the emphasis on the About page, iNat is not a repository for external [read: other people’s] data. And there are probably many other repositories for images of such collections.