Hey curators. As always, thanks for everything you do to keep iNat running. We made a few small additions to the Community Guidelines and I wanted to give a brief explanation here.
In the intro, we added:
Keep in mind that staff may, at their discretion, remove content that we deem harmful to iNaturalist’s community or data quality. This includes intentionally false content, machine generated content, content created by sockpuppet accounts, hate speech, pornography, and the like.
We just wanted to be explicit that content may be removed by staff. In general it’s not something we like to do, but sometimes we feel it’s necessary. We also hope it will deter people from adding machine generated content, sockpuppet content, or lots of intentionally false content, in addition to clearly offensive or obscene content.
I also cleaned up the first paragraph to make clear that the original guidelines came from a community-wide discussion, and that later additions were made by staff.
Under Suspendable Offenses we added:
(!) Intentionally adding false IDs or DQA votes. We expect you to submit information that you believe is an accurate assessment of the evidence provided, and not intentionally false. It’s ok to make an incorrect identification or accidentally add an incorrect date or something, but it’s not ok to intentionally add an incorrect identification or add an intentionally false vote to the Data Quality Assessment.
We’ve noticed instances (and anecdotally they seem to have become more common) where people intentionally add false IDs or DQA votes to make observations casual, obscured, or just to mess with the observer or Community ID - usually in retribution for some real or perceived wrong, or just to troll. Since this clearly unwelcome behavior wasn’t addressed directly in the Community Guidelines, we added it.
As for enforcment - like most things it often comes down to a judgement call, but scale should be a determining factor. If it happens a few times from a new user, it might be worth a warning. If it’s at a large scale or is bullying, it might be worth an immediate suspension.
Under Good Form we added:
Add accurate content and take community feedback into account. Any account that adds content we believe decreases the accuracy of iNaturalist data may be suspended, particularly if that account behaves like a machine, e.g. adds a lot of content very quickly and does not respond to comments and messages.
This is mostly for people who add a lot of wrong/misinformed IDs and never respond to feedback from the community. Sometimes suspension can be used a last resort to get their attention.
Let me know if you have any questions.
