I want to express my great appreciation for everyone who has been dedicating their time to fighting against copyright violations and falsified observations over this CNC weekend. All together we’ve flagged over 3,000 individual images for copyright since the event started. There are probably tens of thousands left to go, but it’s still a significant dent!
If anyone else wants to pitch in, there are a few hotspots with a lot of issues right now:
For this kind of thing, it is helpful to split the work up. For example, one person could do the four pages of ducks in the area your last link leads to, then post that they’ve done the ducks, so the next person doesn’t bother looking at ducks.
I have not actually looked at all the ducks, but the little bit of looking I’ve done, I see several instances where one duck photo is cropped and adjusted slightly, then reposted as a new observation by a different user.
I also immediately see at least one instance where a user adjusted their own photo and then reposted it as a new observation.
Tricksy - when observers are motivated by the challenge to rack up as many obs as possible, and within the 4 days.
Have been looking at underwater pictures - the same picture - focused on the shark - then uploaded again for various blurry life forms around the edges. Not against the rules, but painful to ID!
One user who I can see copied other’s observations has a brand new account, and exactly 400 observations. For some this is a school assignment gone wrong, others may just be responding to the challenge in appropriate ways.
Edit: And honestly, while I share and applaud the instinct to try to remove these, it is so easy to produce these and so much work to track them down that ultimately I think an automated approach would be necessary. Search for images that exactly match, or are modifications of the same image, and if they are posted by different observers, auto-flag all but the oldest. This could also be applied to matching images by the same observer with different places or times.
Edit: Looking at that same area from last year’s CNC, there are also many duplicates and copies.
At this point, nobody should have to do this much work. The site needs a way of automated copyright detection system. This is too much work for too small a group of people.
I did that in the past, but less than 10% acknowledge or apparently even bother to read them. So most of it’s just wasted effort.
Honestly, I’d be happy if there were stricter rules and harsher punishments during CNC. For example 3 or maybe even 2 strikes and your account gets suspended for the duration of the event. And maybe your IP gets blocked so they cannot just create a new account, but idk how that works.
And I agree with @zoology123: this should be automated. If you look over at the “Curator” category, there’s a thread on how much moderation is needed.
I sort by Date Oberved when I ID, so I notice obvious duplicates.
Since I have noticed the duplicates , I add a comment, copypasta the obs number from one to the other.
See also … please delete one
which is mostly a courtesy to the next identifier.
Which is also why I use comment and copypasta for ‘one’ obs spread across many, flower, leaf and wide view each in a separate obs is tiresome to ID.
I participate in the CNC and am one of the local organizers, so I appreciate being able to use Casual observations to record distant birds, calling amphibians, and basking turtles, organisms I can’t get a photo or recording of. But I would be happy to not allow Casual observations at all if it would lessen the burden on identifiers. There are hundred, if not thousands, of people world-wide who put enormous effort into organizing the CNC, but aside from the usual iNat identifiers, I think very few people are working to get observations identified afterwards (I could be wrong about that).
If the goal of the CNC organizers is really just to introduce people to their local biodiversity, maybe the resulting photographs should just be uploaded to Facebook or Instagram or some such place, instead of burdening iNaturalist. Sure, many of the CNC observations should be on iNat, but if identifiers get burnt out and turned off from identifying at all, is it really worth it?
It might be interesting to see the affects of queuing the offending observations and not removing them until the last 10 minutes of the CNC. Lots of balloons bursted and maybe a lesson for next year.
I’d prefer to see a separate instance of iNaturalist called something else, that could be used for gamification exercises like the CNC. It could also be used for teaching school/college courses. Perhaps with the added ability for a subset of users to promote observations to iNat proper. Then at least a deluge of poor records is contained and not allowed to degrade iNat.
As a large-scale identifier of fungi I will say that exercises like the CNC may be the final straw that pushes me to abandon iNat. The combination of inappropriately motivated individuals supported by very poor CV/GeoModel suggestions is becoming too much to handle.
Despite the message that iNat is primarily intended to engage people with nature I think we all recognise that is is also a valuable scientific resource. RG data gets exported to GBIF and iNat is one of their largest datasets. That value is being eroded, and CNC adds considerably to that erosion. At some point I think there will be the pressure for GBIF to pull the plug on iNat data.
I’m glad to hear it. I could’ve sworn that there was language to that effect on the Seek page, but I see there isn’t now. I’ll edit my post to avoid being a vector of misinformation
iNat hosts CNC, but perhaps iNat needs to weigh up identifier burnout, and the daunting task of getting the data (in our chosen corner) tidied up again when CNC closes on Sunday evening. Yes we welcome and encourage newbies - but we need a friendly barrier between uploaded for CNC and promoted to a valid iNat obs.
