It’s not a competition this year, right? And yet I see cities and participants tweeting that they’re winning. If we don’t like leaderboards because the encourage bad identification, etc., we surely shouldn’t like them when they may encourage unsafe activity.
This is unlikely to happen during the CNC as we’re not making changes to the site at this time. But I’m open to letting project creators remove leaderboards from their projects, which is an option that a few people have requested in the past via email.
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Consider it like a school sports day, yes it’s still a competition but it;s not the winning that counts but the taking part.
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This kind of mixed messaging is exactly what concerns me about the way the event is happening this year, @lewismitchell.
The organizers say explicitly, and for good public health reasons: it’s not a competition. And yet of course it is, both historically and as it continues to be presented. I can still look up which cities and participants are “winning” in the 2019 sense. Perhaps this winning no longer counts, officially–so why are we still counting at all?
CNC says it’s not responsible for the way projects display on iNat. iNat folks say well, it’s not us, it’s the CNC, talk to them. These are all good people, and I’ve obviously expressed concerns too late in the day. I nevertheless worry that the failure to more thoroughly reimagine the challenge may in fact be dangerous. And from a place where staying in is the responsible thing to do at this point, it feels more demoralizing than anything else this year.
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Say it to all people who can’t take part how they lost in that competition.
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Lewismitchell, you’ve just described the CNC in a normal year.
By the way, welcome to the forums.
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The official results are actually on the City Nature Challenge website, since not all cities use iNaturalist. You can see there that we are displaying the collective results, and the city numbers as a list alphabetically.
I didn’t know that leaderboards could be removed from individual projects - even as a very regular iNat user - and I definitely would’ve let the organizers know that they could have requested them removed off their projects had I known. @tiwane Can you clarify if leaderboards can be removed from umbrella projects? Not that I’m asking the iNat staff to do it this year - you all are doing an amazing job keeping everything running smoothly this weekend! - but I’m guessing that’s where the main confusion lies for this year, the CNC 2020 umbrella project.
We’re all doing the best we can, I promise, and I will celebrate the fact that we were able to entirely pivot the CNC from bioblitzes and in-person events in parks & open spaces to individuals & families exploring their backyard and neighborhoods, in the span of 5 weeks. It was a TON of work, above and beyond the incredible amount of work the CNC takes to put on every year. And the fact that 16,000 people, so far, have chosen to connect to nature in whatever ways they can right now… amazing.
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Since Tony mentioned this won’t be occurring during the 2020 CNC, I’ve updated the feature request title to the broader option to remove leaderboards from projects generally, not just ones affiliated with the iNaturalist piece of the City Nature Challenge. There are a few ways it would be cool to have the projects pages be a bit more modular, for example on one of the projects I manage, it excludes Needs ID and Casual observations, so the little wheel showing the breakdown of the 3 quality grades is kind of extraneous, and I’d like to highlight the journal posts a bit more instead.
@kestrel from what I can see there isn’t an existing option to remove leaderboards from Umbrella projects either.
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Sorry if I was unclear, it’s not an option at the moment. Removal of the leaderboard (or other modular options) has been brought up few times over the years, via email, and I think it would be a good option to eventually implement if technically possible. I think the CNC team has done an amazing job messaging around this year’s CNC, having to scramble with very little time.
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I’ll continue to hassle people who seem to be promoting CNC competition per se: tweets urging city A to beat city B, or noting their position on a leaderboard. I worry, belatedly and no doubt pathetically, about the vestiges of competitiveness in the whole thing: you really want to rob me of my fear and anxiety right now? Show me a cool creature and I’ll share your joy.
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Those leaderboards are already mentioned in projects’ posts about this CNC in a way of comparing, so it does actually sound as encouraging of unsafe activity. If not removing leaderboards, can something be made with such parts of messages?
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I’ve noticed significant variation in local projects’ messaging, @fffffffff. I live in NYC but iNat a lot in Philly, where my partner is. The NYC pages seem as on point and vigilant as you could hope for, given ongoing participation. Philly’s tweets today just straight-up mock the turn to non-competitive observing. I suppose this makes sense: 50 deaths in NYC now for every 1 in Philly, and their mindsets may be at where New York’s were in the early days: no worries, open for business! But I’ve given up complaining: if people want their tattoos and their hair done and to rush en masse to already crowded parks, it’s up to them.
I like @bouteloua’s thoughts about about experimenting with project pages. In ordinary times I think leaderboards are fun, but other elements would be fun there too, like journals or maybe graphs or calendar elements depending on the kind of project. I add to one “place” project (Randall’s Island in NYC)…maybe a critter of them month there or something.
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I would like this option for my project.
Is there a way, as Project Admin, to remove the “leaderboard” from the Project?
We would like it to be less competitive, and broader participation.
Some of our observers are quite active, but we don’t want to chill the occasional observer.
Thanks.
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Welcome to the Forum!
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I am also interested in being able to remove the leaderboard from umbrella projects. I administer one larger traditional project and we are beginning to have specific groups want to contribute observations via custom-branded subprojects (all collecting the same data). Those groups have different numbers of participants, as well as operate at varying spatial and temporal scales, which renders the leaderboard both meaningless and misleading. I’d like to include those subproject observations within the larger project and think converting it to an umbrella project would accomplish that, but not if that leaderboard is the first thing that participants see when they arrive on the umbrella page.
Alternatively, might there be a way for an administrator to tag observations from one project (or subproject, in my above case) to a “mother” project without people having to join that “mother” project?
Thanks!
Stan Rullman
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Thanks, Astra.
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Any further thoughts on this several years later? Are there any plans to eventually implement some option to remove specific modules? (I can see other use cases besides the leaderboard – e.g., I’d prefer to not include a map for my balcony project and in fact I almost deleted the project again once I realized that a map was a fixed part of project pages and not removable.)
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Do you use a pinned location with wide accuracy, which includes ‘your balcony’ ?
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/elephant-s-eye-on-false-bay
So far, not one pin has landed ‘here’.
Yes, exactly, I obscure the exact location using a pinned location, but there are a couple of reasons I would still prefer not to show a map on the project page.
For some reason the map shows a very zoomed in view of the spot of the pin, not the entire accuracy circle, making it look as though I have provided a very specific location (even if this is not where I actually live).
More importantly, I find that I am less comfortable visually signalling my approximate location so prominently on the project page (it’s the first thing one sees after the stats and header) than I am in the individual observations, where the map is not the informational focus of the page.
Also in a case like this (a single pinned location), a map is a bit of a waste of space on the page compared to a project where the map shows the distribution of observations in a larger space.
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It’s not a priority, but still something to consider.
Any reason you don’t obscure the location instead?