Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.
Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Brave
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
Step 1: Browse observations (I was looking for unidentified observations) and find something in Ukraine. This lichen is in Voznesens’kyi district, Mykolaiv Oblast.
Step 2: Find something in Russia (or Greece, or China). This mouse was in Пограничном, Приморском крае.
Why are places in Ukraine written in the Latin alphabet, when places in Russia are written in the Cyrillic alphabet? They should be consistent.
I’m guessing this is somehow related to the specific way certain observations were recorded, as there are also plenty of Ukrainian observations with location listed in Cyrillic.
Some of the Cyrillic locations are in Russian, and some are in Ukrainian. “Для половины населения Украины русский язык родной!” said a sign in 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Meeting_in_Kharkov.jpg); I don’t know how true that is today, but the president is a native Russian speaker. Київ and Киев are both in the table.
Correct. What’s being referring to by the OP is the locality note, which is what Google or Apple Maps returns as the “name” for the coordinates iNat sends them. iNat just records that as a text string for the locality note. iNat doesn’t control this, and it’s not a bug (at least on iNat’s end).
there are a couple of situations where the displayed place names do come from iNaturalist places – when observations are obscured in the system, and when reverse geocoding via Google fails and falls back to iNaturalist places. these cases should represent a small portion of observations though.
It’s unfortunate that Google has gradually made it impossible to report errors in Google Maps that aren’t related to businesses. I imagine this is due to people having strong feelings about things like disputed borders and occupied territories, but it leaves most of Google Maps’ coverage of developing countries in utter shambles (and Apple Maps is even worse), which iNaturalist then inherits. I don’t have any solution to offer, only unhelpful grumbling.
I rewrite that text, almost every time.
If iNat ever does the ‘helpful weekly hint’ suggested in comments on this thread - looking at the locality note and correcting it to suit yourself - could be on the list. (Lots of my Cape Town obs are at Silvermine, which Google wrongly calls Silver Mine)
Agree - especially a problem in less-populated areas. In rural Oregon (USA), observations often get labeled with the nearest large town, which may be 100+ km away in an entirely different biome.
