Observation Fields are a potentially very powerful tool, and do get a lot of use, but unfortunately because anyone can create a field they are plagued with many repetitive or redundant or contradictory options. We often direct people to fields when they have feature requests on the forums or site, b…

Agree across the board, the only change / addition I would make is that it would be great if the curated fields suggested mirrored the terms and naming standards used by the DarwinCore framework. Oh and some process needs to be implemented for translation, so the same field can be used across multi…

[image] charlie: Consider making it so that only curators - or even a subset of curators - can create new fields. Maybe, if fields are going to be very well curated, i.e. approved within hours, and not potentially going months or years before curation like some other pieces of the site… One o…

Maybe something somewhere between the two ? Continuing to allow all users to create new fields at will seems to be a recipe for simply getting back to where we are now even if a clean-up is done. Maybe requiring a curator approval to activate a new field ? Allowing anyone to create one, but it only…

I get the concern about slow curation, etc… but i don’t see any other way to stop this flood of duplicative fields. And unfortunately as it stands now, the fields are very limited in their use, especially to newbies, because of that. Another alternative would be to let anyone create whatever, but a…

I’d like to use fields more and this sounds like a good general set of changes that could make it 1000% easier. As it stands, I’m only confident using breeding bird codes (which I found by accident) because I am already familiar with them as they’re standardized and not unique to the site. I am us…

Relatedly I created a forum wiki where we can start looking at choosing standardized versions of fields and tracking some useful ones. Should be helpful whether or not these broader changes occur. Feel free to add to and edit it. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observation-field-standardization-wiki…

automatically delete any field that was made a long time ago and has no entries. THERE ARE FAR TOO MANY Create curator tools that allow merging of fields without any loss of observation data, project affiliation, etc I think you will need this that few that it can be done by the staff…Making t…

These are the fields i use. There are about 7 fields There are about 12 groups(birds, mammals, fish, plants) and the context/List of values can vary within the group so the amount of options are 12*7=84 I never under stood the fields iNat uses so i hope to figure out what is the best way to go, c…

Well it definitely kinda breaks this post, can you edit it out and link to it instead maybe? If I am understanding you right you could make those fields on inat but might be a pain to use the drop down with so many options

Standardize and Clean Up Observation Fields

Feature Requests

charlie February 23, 2019, 10:31pm 10

I am still not understanding what this huge list is. Is this a list of VALUES you would like to have in one field? Or would you make a field for every one of those? I don’t think the latter is a good idea.

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Propose a default/Basic set of Observation fields Feature Requests	3	669	March 15, 2019
Disallow others to edit your observation fields (opt in) Feature Requests	28	2510	September 25, 2020

Standardize and Clean Up Observation Fields

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