Penang Intersecondary School City Nature Challenge Project

this comment on the Penang project page:

Comments

Thumb

@lingeshwarry what a nightmare, as useful and needed for iNaturalist community as two broken legs! I wished you got the meaning why, still won’t try to explain further.

Posted by erwin_pteridophilos about 11 hours ago

I have messaged him directly and asked him to consider deleting it.

I agree. When we all joined we were one person learning the ropes, and there were dozens of helpers to guide us. This is 1400 joining, and still only the dozens of helpers, so they don’t have the same level of 1:1 learning that we got. Also, they are joining and hitting the ground running, 200-700 observations in their first day or two! I don’t know about everyone else, but I learnt much slower, a few observations at a time and had the opportunity to alter behaviour before there was a huge impact.

I reckon we need an intro video, translated to many languages, that cover all the basic learning required to be a “good community participant”, and have all new users required to watch that before their account is activated. Re-watching it could also be a requirement for reactivation of a suspended account…

7 Likes

The problem is 95% or more of these folks will never open the app again once the Nature Challenge is over. Just look at how many observations came in from Malaysia today after it was over.

2 Likes

All the more reason to get them schooled up on being a good observer BEFORE they start!

1 Like

Unfortunately their motivation is not to be good observers, it is to record as much as possible as quickly as possible given the timeframe of the Nature Challenge.

2 Likes

I’m kind of dreading the City Nature Challenge after this debacle. I don’t mind newbies throwing in a few cultivars when starting out, but it’s usually just a few!

I’m almost thinking we need some kind of barrier to entry before allowing users full site use - something like successfully IDing X number of their own observations before they can post more. I don’t know if that’d work though.

3 Likes

I felt that way after last year’s City Nature Challenge. But this year for the first time my area has one, so I will participate.

I agree. I have been trying unsuccessfully to make a Feature Request on limiting the ability to turn something Research Grade. Your idea would expand that, and I like it!

1 Like

It has occurred to me that perhaps a simple solution to this kind of mess would be to simply disable the auto-suggest ID for regions that have limited numbers of observations (until there is a critical mass of observations for it to work with, whatever number that may be). It seems like it’s rarely helpful for finding a correct ID in these areas currently, and just encourages people to pick a suggestion at random.

7 Likes

I totally agree. I think changes could be made to the system to correct these problems, and are preferable to changes asking people to alter their behavior voluntarily. I wonder if changes could be made to the collection project parameters that would help without affecting other important collection projects, since collection projects are the vehicle for these events.

1 Like

The pinnacle of bad student IDs: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/5890862
(Anyone feel free to help, if I did the math right we still need 8 more IDs to override all the students.)

8 Likes

wow, that’s … i mean i don’t think there’s ever been a plant in the history of iNat with half that many IDs added. Wow. Also obviously a muskrat :)

wow, is right! I’m thinking an even better place for non-Penang-related student/duress/contest user discussions might be here though: https://inaturalist.trydiscourse.com/t/duress-and-contest-users-discussion-thread/422/3 that way we can all find such examples (I added a muskrat “agree!” for this one, too) in a topic heading that will be a little more universally relevant and easier to search. After this particular challenge gets cleaned up these conversations will still be very useful and may get lost or forgotten here. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to give you an update about the Penang project. @carrieseltzer and I chatted with the organizers via video for about an hour yesterday, California time. They were incredibly nice, gracious, and apologetic about what they describe as the “havok” this project created, the scale of which took them totally by surprise. Some quick takeaways:

  • the purpose of this project was to encourage the kids to get outside and take notice of the living things around them, and I do believe this was accomplished, although it was detrimental to those of us who were wading through the observations. I do think that’s important to remember. They said the kids had a lot of fun and were seeing many things they’d never noticed before.

  • they disseminated documents, including how-tos that told the kids to take photos of wild organisms, to not use computer vision suggestions and instead make high-level IDs, etc. but apparently this message was lost and/or misunderstood by some students. Also some of the teachers who were not directly involved apparently gave advice such as “go photograph vegetables in markets.” So kind of like a game of telephone, the message became garbled. We’ll be reviewing those documents so we can provide feedback.

  • while there was a tangible prize involved, the organizers believe most of the students weren’t aware of it and were instead motivated less by a tangible prize and more by wanting to just do well (we were assured no grades were involved) and due to competition between the two school districts in the area. I’m paraphrasing but the organizers told us that in the area it is very important to do what teachers ask you to do and to excel.

  • moving forward with the actual City Nature Challenge, they won’t be promoting it in secondary schools but more to the general public and to college students, especially those studying biology. They’re also going to try and recruit biology students and other local experts to ID observations in the project as practice for CNC and to help clean up the data from this event. The upside to all of this is that we have a lot of data now and, if properly identified, can help iNat a) train its vision model on species more prevalent in Asia so it’s more accurate there and b) know which species are likely to be captive/cultivated in Penang.

My two my main conclusions after this conversation are:

  1. There are things iNat can do with code, design, and messaging to mitigate similar events (I doubt we can prevent them totally), and we’re looking into them. If you have ideas, please post them in General or make a concrete feature request.

  2. It is incredibly important to always keep the “assume people mean well” Community Guideline in mind. I know some frustrations were vented by iNat users, and I was frustrated as well, but if there were any insults or put-downs directed at the organizers or participants, they were unwarranted. I also apologized on the community’s behalf if they received any untoward messages and the organizers were very gracious. The vast majority of folks involved in the event acted in good faith and the organizers were quite willing and open to discussing the issues with us.

24 Likes

Thanks Tony, that helps a lot and makes it feel like this event can be productive in the end.

Do you happen to know why they set the Quality Grade settings to Needs ID and Casual rather than Research Grade and Needs ID?

4 Likes

We didn’t get into that but I imagine it’s due to unfamiliarity with the platform.

2 Likes

Thanks, Tony. Looking over the aftermath, I’ve seen a bunch of the students going back and going to top-level IDs, like “Plant”, which is pretty constructive. (Some have switched off community ID, which is less constructive, but oh well.)

Having seen similar experience play out on Wikipedia, I know it can be very frustrating for both teachers and staffers caught in the middle: you have students on one hand, and community on the other, whom you’re sort of answerable for but have very little direct ability to control, becoming increasingly aggravated as cultures collide.

Do you know if the organizers saw or made use of the Teacher’s Guide before this deployed? I started to write down some of my thoughts from experience here and on Wikipedia and found that the guide hit the major points so well I didn’t see the use in it! Of course, just because it’s there doesn’t mean people will read it or use it, but I think it’s something I’d try to push to organizers of all major events, whether or not they’re strictly speaking “teachers”.

8 Likes

Many thanks to Tony and Carrie, as well as all of the curators that devoted some time (and headaches) to managing the influx of observations.

6 Likes

Hear hear! :+1:

5 Likes

This seems like a really intelligent and practical idea for preventing things like the “Penang incident” from happening again, especially during the upcoming City Nature Challenge. For CNC this year, I will be in town but out making observations during the observation days of CNC, and will be trying to ID NYC observations during the identification days of CNC, so I won’t have time to spend struggling with attempting to clean up an avalanche of misleading stuff from parts of the world where the AI does not yet know what is what.

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.