bushman_k:
Please, read my first message in this thread where I clearly address the dichotomy of beliefs related to the purpose of the crowdsourced projects in general and iNaturalist in particular. Without solving this dichotomy, it makes zero sense to discuss any solution or even some issues since the base premise haven’t been established.
When I read these I am reminded of the following quote which for me defines the goal of the project, the base premise, and the place data and scientific research had in the founding of the platform:
kueda:
Our primary goal in operating iNaturalist is to connect people to nature, and by that we mean getting people to feel that the non-human world has personal significance and is worth protecting. If we connect people to nature without contributing to any specific scientific outcomes or quantifiable conservation results, then we’re still doing our job. But if we just contribute to science without helping people care about the natural world, we’ll be on the wrong track.https://sciencenode.org/feature/nerding-out-over-nature.php
The above is echoed at:
iNaturalist is a platform for helping to connect people to nature first, and a database second. If iNat caused these people to slow down for a second and pay attention to a non-human organism when they might not have otherwise, then these observations have value. … the data iNat produces is a byproduct. If it’s messy but people are outside looking at stuff, then the system is fulfilling its purpose. For those of us who care about the utility of the data, we have tools for assessing the data quality of each record…
And I suspect that this ethos is the secret sauce that has made iNaturalist the rather massively successful platform that it is.
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