Some non-standard places are not editable even by curators

[jwidness]

Platform: website

Browser: any

Non-curators can only edit places they create. Curators are supposed to also be allowed to edit any non-standard place. However, some non-standard places are not editable even by curators. Two examples:

The town of Charlottesville, VA

The town of Gainesville, GA

Previous discussions mentioning this include:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/duplicate-places/2909
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/editing-a-place-boundary/3547
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/duplicate-places-for-colorado-state-parks/10904/9

In the Colorado discussion, @pisum said

@pisum

based on my interpretation of the source code…

  def editable_by?(user)
    return false if user.blank?
    return true if user.is_admin?
    return true if user.is_curator? && admin_level.nil?
    return true if self.user_id == user.id
    return false if !admin_level.nil? && !user.is_admin?
    false
  end

… i think the deal in that example was that that place had an admin_level=3, which requires admin privileges (beyond curator) to edit, if not the creator. i couldn’t find anything in the code that gave me an idea of why that place had admin_level=3. maybe there used to be code that assigned admin_level for towns / municipalities? (and maybe there ought to be a clean up of admin_level on old towns and municipalities, especially ones without polygon geography?)

[nathantaylor]

Could be because of this: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/temporary-freeze-on-large-places-life-list-updates-and-taxon-changes-during-april-22-may-4/11516

[jwidness]

This has been an issue dating back to before the forum even started.

[mangum]

I agree, this has been a wide spread, long standing problem.

I’ve been trying to get Charlottesville edited for about a year now to no avail. Both “Charlottesvilles” are non-standard places that are incorrect to some degree (discussed in https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/duplicate-places/2909). We don’t have the ability to edit either of them.

[jwidness]

Another admin level 3 non-editable place: https://www.inaturalist.org/places/berkeley

Edit: and another https://www.inaturalist.org/places/new-orleans

[jwidness]

tiwane fixed Berkeley, so that’s one down!

[jwidness]

Follow-up summary of some history behind admin_level places:

In 2014, countries that use a different name for their state-level places weren’t super happy that iNat was calling them states (e.g. Canadian provinces). So instead of using state/county, iNat switched to integers: 0 for country level, 1 for state level, 2 for county level, and 3 for town. This is the admin_level – admin as in government administration, not admin as in sysadmin. At this point in time, the admin_level showed on the place edit screen and could be changed by regular users, and it was also set automatically, e.g. if you made a new place of type Town, it would get admin_level=3. In late 2015, places were split into Standard and Community Curated, where the definition of Community Curated was anything without an admin level. By definition, towns became standard places, despite Scott saying he preferred to leave them Community Curated. Within a few months, admin_level was removed from the place edit page and Scott made is so that “only admins” could edit places “with admin_level not nil” – a statement that I think made the issue more confusing because “admin” is used with two different meanings. Anyway, at that point, any towns with admin_level=3 effectively became uneditable standard places. This probably worked out ok for towns in VT with boundaries, but many admin_level=3 towns were point places, like the ones in Virginia at the beginning of this thread.

Currently, new places of type Town are not automatically assigned admin_level=3, and only site staff could give them that level, so most towns are considered Community Curated and are editable.

It seems to me that the fix for this issue is to decide once and for all how to treat town-level places. Should they be standard or community curated?