I would like to give an example of why I use a psudonym on this site. I mostly upload from town A, and anyone who knew my surname on the site would be able to associate me with the one household of people with this surname in town A. If I am on holiday in town B, a distance away, I will also upload observations. This would imply that I am not in town A, and people could surmise this is a good time to burgle my house.
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Nobody is requiring you to use this data or the website at all. I post observations because I want to. I really don’t care if dennispaulson, if that’s your real name, believe the observation is real or that I’m real. I find that this is the appropriate level of responsibility for my interactions with this website.
And one other thing that you seem to be missing. iNat is not a citizen science project. It’s a tool that can be used for citizen science. Any project using the tool can have additional requirements before observers participate. But those are left to the project.
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Agreed. I had a user with a pseudonym agree with my tentative ID of one of my records. I was curious what the person’s expertise was with that organism (which was one I was unfamiliar with and not that easy to ID) but there was nothing in the profile. Sometime later, I ran across the person’s ID on something else – they were quite active in agreeing with IDs on other iNatters’ records – and found from their profile page they’d been suspended from iNat for unknown reason. Which makes me question the quality of their agreeing IDs.
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In fairness to @dennispaulson, I know he’s been working to clean up a lot of Odonata records that have been misidentified and attained Research Grade. Those bad records feed into the maps on iNat, GBIF, and possibly other databases, resulting in erroneous range maps. As I’ve seen myself, erroneous range maps used as a reference often lead to more erroneous IDs. It’s a thankless but necessary job in quality control that requires expertise in the taxa and occasionally requires one to assess the expertise of the observer and other reviewers. He’s certainly helped me fix my own bad IDs on my and others’ records.
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I do have my real name linked to my profile, but as others have pointed out there are many, many reasons why some people can not or should not provide their ‘real’ names. "real’ government designated names can also provide problems for people escaping abusive situations, trans* people in transition, people with stalkers, etc. Also the process of determining what name constitutes a ‘real’ name has led to discrimination against some groups who do not have Western-sounding names. So yeah, while I understand why the issues exist, it is still much better off as it is.
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Thanks for all the comments, very sobering. You’re painting a picture for me of a much worse world populated by even more bad people (bosses!) than I imagined. So forgetting Facebook, I suppose the thousands of people who post on those other citizen-science platforms under their real names are just those people who are less menaced by that world. I suppose one difference may be that so many people take photos for iNaturalist at their own home, and I understand that concern, although in my own case I wouldn’t even have thought about it.
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and a PS - you haven’t linked to your iNat profile from this forum - which means, that until @jnstuart spoke up for you, you had NO credentials here in the parallel universe of the forum.
Weirdly, the forum is set up so people (Not you, of course) can see the posts, and create a profile in the forum without being on iNat itself at all.
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I’ve no problem with using my real name and couldn’t care less if people know where I live but once the first John Smith has opened an account that cuts out all the other people with the same name - hence “stage names” I guess
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It’s a strange world, this Internet thing. In the old days, biologists and indeed many amateur naturalists knew each other personally, such as through conferences, phone calls, snail-mail correspondence. Not to mention the scientific literature where no one used pseudonyms. Granted, it was a smaller world since communication was less easy. The internet has greatly expanded communication and brougt in folks who otherwise might not have been involved, but we now have to be more cautious about what information we reveal about ourselves. More inclusive now, and more personal in many ways but at the same time less personal.
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@dianastuder, I tried to create a profile and failed utterly. I filled it all in and clicked Save Changes, but nothing shows up on the page allocated to me. I obviously know more about dragonflies than how to maneuver on websites.
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I think there’s probably a goodly number of people who would fill out their profile and include their real name (maybe not as their username but the name that shows up on their profile page and attribution) but haven’t done so because it’s not something that’s brought to their attention or because they mainly use the iOS app and can’t edit their profile there (that functionality is on the drawing board, I promise).
I think it would be great to suggest filling out a profile as part of the onboarding process for new users to capture more of those folks. I’d never want to make it mandatory, though.
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Looks like it is all there to me 
No, that’s my original entry. I just entered a much longer one where I was instructed to, but apparently it’s not taking.
And I just figured out how to do it. Mastering the internet takes more than a PhD, I think.
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Sadly, Dennis, it probably takes youth. Something I’ve run out of.
Great profile.
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When I joined I didn’t add my real name, I don’t remember it being an obvious step. I only ended up adding it when I went through and edited my settings several months later.
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I absolutely respect those that give time from their selected careers to offer their expertise to iNaturalist and appreciate being able to see their credentials in their profile.
Before I retired I had my own business and preferred to keep my personal life relatively private from my work life.
In my chosen career I was credentialed, peer recognized, a peer community leader, responsible for a segment of the public community, and was constantly improving my skill set. I had spent many years developing myself for this career and maintaining it.
In my private life I was an absolute amateur. I had not had the time to develop the skill sets of my personal interests - I had put them on hold. I did not wish my amateurishness to spill into my career and I wished to have the privacy to develop at my own pace. They say an expert has made more mistakes than an amateur - I had and still have a lot of mistakes to make now that I have time.
It was not until I retired that I attached my (common) name to my pseudonym. Now that I am retired, other than discipline, my past career has little bearing on my present interests. I am quite content to have someone 45 years younger have a greater, uncredentialed, skill set and show better judgment than me. There is a credentialed/recognized alphabet soup that could be attached to my name but I’m just happy being Bob.
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Bravo - now I can see Slater Museum, and know that Google lists you after the pro golfer. I thought that second one was probably you.
There are two more threads running here in the forums that tie in
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As most women and transgender people on here can probably attest, real name policies facilitate harassment and stalking. There are many articles on the internet about why real name policies hurt women and transgender people, especially regarding Facebook. As for voluntary use of real names, I think it would be great for more people to use them, but I don’t think it’s that important, personally.
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