Hello. I’m fairly new to iNat, so it’s possible this has been discussed before and/or it’s controversial. In looking for ways to help out on the site, I’ve had a lot of people tell me it is helpful to go through “unknown” observations and put them into broad categories (“plants,” “birds,” etc) so th…

I would not support making the Is Wild / Captive field be mandatory. The default assumption on the site for records is that they are wild. The same way the default assumption is that the date is accurate, the location is accurate, that the evidence actually supports the presence of the organism etc,…

A second impact of making the is wild mandatory is if people were to ‘cheat’ and mark yes when they know it is not, it would then require 2 votes to the contrary to get it moved back to casual, as the 1st dissenting vote would only offset the submitters and return it to a base status which is that i…

[image] cmcheatle: if people were to ‘cheat’ and mark yes when they know it is not, it would then require 2 votes to the contrary to get it moved back to casual Why not just have all observations in “Needs ID” with sticky filters for Wild and Casual, to remove the incentive to cheat?

Doing this would more or less break my ability to use Inaturalist the way I do now, would basically ruin the app. And it’s been tried before. It also broke the app any time you didn’t have cell service. So it was reversed. It might reduce some errors but would greatly impact the experience that esta…

[image] charlie: And it’s been tried before. It also broke the app any time you didn’t have cell service. So it was reversed. Here’s something I couldn’t have known. What specifically was tried? When? How long was the trial? Did the app crash or was it just less enjoyable to use? Isn’t a lack…

It was in the beta/test version of the app so it wasn’t released widely I don’t think. You just literally couldn’t observe anything without cell service (to tag the species) and so it didn’t work in most of Vermont and where it did work it was extremely slow. The only way I could see it working wou…

[image] cmcheatle: The default assumption on the site for records is that they are wild. The same way the default assumption is that the date is accurate, the location is accurate, that the evidence actually supports the presence of the organism etc, yet none of those are proposed as mandatory. …

Thank you for linking those topics. They were quite relevant and informative. Update: I do now agree with your decision to move to General. I’m not clear on how feature requests work and I thought the board for them also included discussion of possible requests.

[image] charlie: You just literally couldn’t observe anything without cell service (to tag the species) I wasn’t imagining it as needing to load the database drop down suggestions. I was thinking more that the icons used for the search filtering would be displayed in a row, and you would pok…

well, you could make someone select the high level taxa, but then they’d have to do that even if they knew the species, then drag through the whole thing again to update the species. All while in the field - right now it takes me about 3 seconds to make an observation so anything that takes 30 secon…

Should some fields be required when creating an observation?

General

bouteloua May 30, 2019, 2:30am 14

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/automatic-computer-vision-ids/2074 would be an interesting alternative

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Thoughts on unknown ID level? General	59	1302	October 9, 2025
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Provide separate buttons to start new wild or non-wild observations Feature Requests	23	1933	February 5, 2021
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Should some fields be required when creating an observation?

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