I wasn’t sure which Forum category to choose for this, since my post is about feature request and some general issues. Features that I would like to suggest are interconnected (the reasons are given below): notification when users observations are included in a new collection project, and the possibility to remove own observations from the collection projects. Why? When a collection project is created, observations are automatically included if they were made in the area covered by the project, an observer may never even know about the existence of such a project or that their OBs were included. Observers also cannot remove their observations from the project by themselves. So far, there have been no problems with this (to my knowledge). However, I recently learned about a project (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/birds-of-northern-eurasia-ex-ussr) that I found deeply offensive and that included my OBs, too. I asked several other people listed in this project who, like me, were unaware of it. Almost all of the reactions were similar: they found the project either annoying or offensive. I flagged the project, but there was no reaction. Maybe there are reasons, but I wonder if the reaction would have been as complacent if, say, a British user had created a project called “Biodiversity of the British Empire”, a German user wanted to collect data for “Ornithofauna of the lands conquered by the Germans during World War II”, or a Japanese user created a project called “Manchukuo Plants”, etc. In short, I, and probably many others, ones not in the Forum too, would like to know where our names and data appear. I must admit, that the situation has spoiled my fun of using iNat considerably.
You may want to comment on / vote for this feature request:
Restrict your observations from appearing in someone else’s collection project
Just to be clear, curators very quickly (within a couple of hours, and the flag was added in early morning North America time where most curators are based) escalated the flag to site staff to look at, something which indicates a level of concern, and is a relatively infrequent action.
However, this is not the type of issue curators who are the first line of dealing with flags are empowered to deal with (similar to things like border and sovereignty issues etc)
Hi @jurga_li - we try to avoid calling out specific users’ potentially problematic content here on the forum. If you have an issue with someone or their projects, the best thing to do is flag it or to reach out to help@inaturalist.org. If you’d like to resubmit your post without specific examples or the link to the project and have a more general discussion, please do. For now I have removed it from the forum homepage.
Not sure why a project would be defined this way unless it was to make a political statement. Or perhaps for comparative purposes with some publication from the past that covered the former USSR.
In the United States, I can imagine a project that could be titled “Birds of the Southern U.S.” but I would be disturbed by one called “Birds of the Confederate States.”
You yourself gave an example. Well, I am disturbed when a former occupant country created a project including countries which were occupied by it (and still officially denies the occupation). I should think that creating territorial projects one must think twice about the territory involved and possible consequences. There are many cans of worms in world and European geopolitics.
Very well, I am resubmitting the post without content. Note, that I only posted this one when there was no reaction to the flag.
As Chris already mentioned, the flag was responded to and staff have been notified.
Yes, I saw. The response was to delete similar flag from other user.
No flags have been deleted. Flags cannot be deleted by curators actually.
If there is one issue, we do combine the discussion into one location rather than have several different discussions fragmented across multiple different flags.
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