So why do they do this? It’s a school assignment to upload X assignments or something?
I’m still in favour of CNC over all. For me IDing has been more fun during the event even because of the steady stream of new observations.
I think the main problem is that a lot of new users either don’t know how the site works or are too focused on their and their city’s numbers going up. If the effects of those could be significantly reduced, that’d be great!
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I have seen thousands of blurry bugs not identifiable to a rank below order, and many pieces of plastic junk identified as plants, or blurry grass pictures taken by observers that recorded 20 observations or less more than 5 years ago, never to be seen again on iNat. As all these pictures take space on the servers, I wondered if iNaturalist had any policy regarding the eventual deletion of such content? Let’s say delete all observations marked as casual and not identified below family level, and observations recorded as “captive” recorded by observers that are currently inactive or that have recorded less than 20 observations more than 2 years ago? How would such a policy fare? Would it benefit the site?
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This likely would benefit the site, because this tends to happen when the community ID “cannot be improved.” If the community agrees that we can’t get to a useful taxomonic level, that is tantamount to agreeing that the observation is not useful.
For this one, I think that dropping “currently inactive” and just going with “less than 20 observations more than 2 years ago” would be more appropriate, since that is a reasonable time frame for concluding that their inactivity is not just temporary.
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It’s nice to know I’m not the only one feeling a bit burnt out by the CNC. A few times recently when I have been identifying, I have had to just stop and walk away. Last night finding an observer who had posted about 40 observations of the same clover flower was what did it. Weirdly, it wasn’t 40 observations using the same photo, it was 40 slightly different photos of the same flower. But it was too much for me to deal with.
Another day it was someone who had 120-odd observations, but they were really about 30 or so each posted 3-4 times.
Then there are the people who have “participated” in the CNC for several years, by just posting the same photos each year. Not photos of the same things, the exact same photos.
Last year I noticed a trend where a group of people seemed to have discovered that you can post a blank observation (no photo), call it anything you like, and it becomes a casual observation of whatever you say it is, and that counts!
The CNC may have some value where people aren’t just competing to get the highest numbers, but where that is all that matters it is a waste of everyone’s time.
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I think those blank photos might be placeholder observations. For example, maybe I spotted a bird but got no photo. So these might just represent those sightings. But I’m not too sure if those are allowed or not.
That’s allowed.
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definitely allowed as said above, but I rather doubt most of these CNC blank records are placeholders; in my experience very few people return to old casual observations to fill in the required details, or at least almost no new users like the masses joining for the CNC. heck, I’m guilty of it too; there’s a few fungi I still haven’t returned photos to after weeks, as I keep forgetting… but I’ve never uploaded a casual observation for “listing” purposes, whereas there’s ample gamified incentive to do so in this time period.
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Neither hhave I. Also what does everyone mean when refering to the CNC being ‘gamified’? I don’t get it.
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“gamification” is basically the aspect of the CNC that involves leaderboards, competition, badges, and championship for regions – anything that brings iNaturalist participation closer to being like a sport or a tournament than a collaboration, research project, nature social network, etc… I would say it’s these aspects above all that incentivise people to post many poor-quality or even stolen photos, in order to advance their own, or their group/city/region’s, rankings.
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Oh, thanks! I understand.
mute the ‘awful’ observers, so you see the others instead?
You’re probably right that people on the CNC uploading blank observations are either playing games with the numbers or making mistakes. However, outside CNC, some people really do upload observations without photos or anything else as a record (for their own purposes) of what they saw there and then.
definitely true — again, as do I. in terms of parsimony though, most large numbers of observations without media uploaded during the CNC, especially of anomalous taxa, are going to fall into this bucket (since we are talking about the CNC specifically in this thread). I don’t mean to make a blanket statement.
Hi everyone,
We are the co-founders (along with Alison Young @kestrel) and Co-Directors of the City Nature Challenge and long-time iNaturalist users. We and the rest of the Global Organizing Team (a small group of natural history museum staff working part-time on this effort throughout the year) wanted to thank all of you for flagging, marking captive/cultivated, and identifying observations. We don’t have to tell you that the City Nature Challenge is the largest concentrated influx of new observations to iNaturalist every year, and along with rediscoveries, first photographs ever, and incredible finds of endangered, rare, and threatened species, there are also lots of photos of common species. Although the City Nature Challenge is a collaboration more than a contest, sometimes the competitive spirit of some individuals leads to observations that take a lot of time to flag. We know this can be frustrating, and we really appreciate your expertise and time in helping curate iNaturalist data.
We also want to make sure that all of you know that the Global Organizing Team spends months working with local organizers and training them on how iNaturalist works and best practices for engaging participants. We work very closely with all of the folks leading in their cities. However, it is impossible to control tens of thousands of users, many of whom are brand new to the platform. We do the absolute best we can and work hard to be welcoming and thankful to new and returning iNaturalist users alike. We know that you all play and have played a critical role in welcoming people as well.
The City Nature Challenge would not be successful without longtime participants and curators like all of you. We value your contributions and expertise.
We will announce the cumulative results on Monday, but preliminary data analysis shows that over 100,000 people will have made over 3 million observations of over 70,000 species! Needless to say, this effort is the largest annual global biodiversity census. Many of this years’ observers are new to iNaturalist, which is amazing, and we hope to keep them positively engaging with the platform and community science at large.
Lastly, the results will be shared in the City Nature Challenge project journal post here. If you would like to learn more about the City Nature Challenge and maybe even organize your community next year. Please visit https://www.citynaturechallenge.org/
Thanks so much,
Rebecca and Lila
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In many cases, yes.
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Oh, groan. It feels like just the people I follow posted half of that. Got to bed real late last night and still wasn’t caught up. The CNC is theoretically Great! I’m all for it! Most of the year. Don’t ask about right now.
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I wonder what would happen if the CNC global organizers required each local organizer to have made 100 IDs of Verifiable observations before they are permitted to sign up to organize a local CNC. Would that help reduce the numbers of “bad” observations?
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I think it would be fairly difficult to fix the issues only with this kind of filter. more expertise by the organisers is good, but doesn’t directly stop the main problem, which is unexpected bad behaviour by student participants. perhaps making clear that observing, and observing features clearly, should be the goal? reminding people that Research Grade is not required or even encouraged for beginner participation, and that adding identifications is something to do only if you know an organism well? underlining very clearly that making extra accounts to agree with yourself is considered punishable cheating? I don’t know if these are too basic to entertain, but so many people — that is, the participants, not the organisers — missed the memo that I don’t think they’re too fundamental to teach.
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After expressing above my feelings of being burnt out, it was nice this morning when I opened iNat to see the sweet little “Thank you identifiers” badge. Thank you iNat!
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