That’s a great idea. Opting out is contrary to the premise of iNaturalist. If you don’t want the community identifying your observation, then post it to Pinterest or Flickr, or some other such platform where community ID isn’t the whole point.
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I wouldn’t mind a museum adding the holotypes of specimens they have with opt-out, similar to an expert in a group as mentioned in an earlier comment. There are tons of insect species with no records and no pictures in the profile.
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Museums shouldn’t post anything on iNat, unless those are type specimens collected by the uploader. For pictures, those should be added to Wiki, or you can go the way mothers do, upload casual observation to use as a species photo (and observation can be deleted).
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Even with the correct location etc? There are quite a few museum records being uploaded of moth specimens…
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Yes, unless person creates a separate account for that, but even then there’s little reason to do it, when you can contact GBIF. Yes, there’re lots of observations like it, but nothing can stop those uploading them.
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I personally do NOT like the “opt out of community taxon” choice. However, it seems important to some people so I think we should have it, annoying though it can be.
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I think things like herbarium and museum collections have a lot of value here if the person posting it has the right to do so. GBIF has much less advanced data management and no ability to comment, change or add IDs, add annotations, add to projects, etc. I personally think the more herbaria and well curated pinned insect observations on here, the better. It’s data, and i’d rather have it in our community than not.
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@tiwane already commented on that, there is a way to contact uploader, but it’s a historical data, so it’s ike saying let’s stop uploading millions of herbarium sheets to GBIF because some can be ided wrong, the point is to get them there, ids can be checked as long as photo is there. If it’s a well curated collection, % of wrong ids will be the same as in any pther collection in GBIF.
People shouldn’t upload stuff from 1800 under their own profiles, they didn’t see the thing, their granparents weren’t alive back then, same with collections around the world when the person sits at one town the whole life.
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i mean, i am not sure of the official policy, but i don’t see any benefit in rejecting data to promote gamification. Like, yes it’s true that person is ‘cheating’ on their life list but maybe they are here to share biodiversity data not compete? it seems wrong to disrupt science to maintain the leaderboard.
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It’s easy to create a separate account, that wouldn’t lead to your name being assigned to not your catches, name of collector would be easy to link to their collections from different sources (as often happens). iNat is said to be “not for every type of biodiversity data” (c), it’s focused on personal experience of users, there’s no need to feed it everything there is about particular species. It’s not scientific to publish something under your name (description doesn’t change it) when it’s not your work, scientific methods for publishing collections don’t mention iNat as far as I know, so there’s no disruption of science.
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I agree it’s better to make a different account for it and not claim it as ones own.
In terms of the leaderboard i think it could be nice to have a code of conduct one can opt into, making it clear what the rules are and what is allowed to count as observations. Not just things like herbarium samples, questions come up on whether drones or wildlife cams are OK, whether a relative’s photo is ok, etc. etc etc. Make it ‘opt-in’ and until someone opts in do not display their account on any leaderboards.
(For what it is worth, i don’t post anything on my main account except strictly things I’ve observed myself in person. I do care about my stats, for my own purposes. i just don’t think they should get in the way of getting good data. Just my opinion.).
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I think this is straying off topic but I had wondered if I should upload images of shells from my collection (with data) to iNat, as they could be valuable specimen photos for comparison purposes for people trying to ID theirs. This runs into the issue of “I did not collect a lot of these myself”, and populates my map with localities I have not visited, and I kind of like the map showing ONLY places I have been myself. I think species in Mollusca tend to be poorly represented, especially deepwater or rare species, but I can’t bring myself to upload pictures of mollusks someone collected in the 1980’s. I don’t know if this is even the purpose of iNat, but my shells aren’t in a museum either so the data is not available to others. I am torn
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If you have dates of when they were collected, uploading them at a separate account is better, if you don’t and they will be casual, it’s likely doesn’t matter much, but as you say that you care about your map, it’s quite fast to set up a gmail account and create and iNat one with it. There was a topic on uploading shells with no dates, with different opinions from iders.
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More data is better! If you have dates and locations for the shells, post their photos! Marina’s idea of setting up a second account for them seems helpful.
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There are several points and they’ve been given on many iterations of this thread. It would be better in my humble opinion to understand those views before being strongly in favour of removing it. If it was removed right now, my observation set would be thrown into chaos. There’s a lot of observations where students or uninformed users posted incorrect IDs and sometimes even had them agreed on, or cases where it is necessary to mediate an ID between different users or experts. I don’t have time to keep up with all these exceptions. The taxon that is the face of an observation is also what decides where it shows on the Identify tab, or in general, and many times it is not in a place where I want it to be (community ID choosing the wrong order, or family, so therefore not being seen by the correct experts). Opting-in is just not timely or particularly appropriate for me.
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I get it. I know what the legitimate reasons are for using it. But I think at the moment the feature is causing a lot more harm to the site than good.
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It’s times like these I wish I could give two loves at a time.
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I think it depends how much the harm can be quantified.
In the worst case, you have an observation that will not reach research grade because the observer does not agree to the ID.
In the best case, you can have quality control and have a way to mediate what happens with your own observations.
I can’t see either of these extremes being a problem, and so, I would not like to see opt-out disappear. I’ve seen people abuse it before, and it’s frustrating, but that’s a problem with people’s approaches to IDs rather than a problem with opt-out itself.
I do have one reason as to why opt-out is a problem, in my eyes, though. Which is for when people are no longer active on iNat, or (sadly) pass away, and none of their historic observations can be changed to match a community ID anymore. But that’s a specific issue which I would not only blame opt-out for.
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Your attention is focused only on the observations.
What about the time spent by identifiers?
“Needs ID” to be replaced by “Only needs confirmation”?
Spending the same amount of time, these 3 identifiers could have helped to identify 3 other observations, instead of taking care of this one that is (likely) still not correctly identified only because of the opting out.
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How much time are you anticipating it takes for an IDer to either hit agree (as in this case), or type an ID name? It can’t be more than 2-4 seconds per observation in a case like this.
I greatly value the time identifiers spend on observations, but I have yet to see that this is a huge obstacle or waste of time outside of these occasional instances. I could be wrong, and maybe a larger proportion of users opt out than I thought. But I only know it to be a small minority of annoyances.
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