If you notice a negative trend with a particular CNC area, I recommend sending a civil message to the project owners/admins and maybe tagging them in on flags as well. They should be not be insulated from the issues their participants are causing for others, and they should be the ones looking for and helping to correct issues, IMO.
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This would be ideal, but the CNCs i have dealt with problems for. I usually dont see much activity from the organizers. But even if the organizers spent 12 hrs a day fixing errors. It wouldnt be enough for a while for many issues. Many of the issues presented are too large for single uncoordinated people to deal with.
I gave up trying to fix Macau incorrect RG observations becuase there are too many. I also hoped many of the sockpuppets, or truly blindly confirming ids would be removed. But that hasnt happened much.
There comes a time when due to scale, you need new tools, or much more help. For an analogy. One person with a shovel can only move a certain amount of sand. If the amount of sand they need to move increases beyond their capability, they either need to get more people to help, or get new tools. Unless you have hundreds of people, people with shovels can only move so much sand before they need tools like exacavators to keep up. If this doesnt happen, a pile of sand will grow larger and larger.
The point of the above analogy is to illustrate my worry over the scaling of iNaturalist. Many specific issues are too large to deal with by the people that would normally task themselves to deal with them.
(Edit)
I suppose, it feels like i’m trying to dig a 10km canal with a few people and a few shovels. This is in reference to CNC Macau alone. The task is so daunting, its easy to give up.
I don’t have perfect solutions, sure ideas. But i don’t know what is best to do a lot of the times when dealing with such widespread issues. I do wish it was easier to organize iders, or curators to tackle certain problems together though.
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Something that could be done on the iNat side: Suspend all accounts with clear indication of sockpuppetry and other clearly fraudulent activity during the CNC, and with no or only crappy observations, and remove all their content.
Using Seek for brand new iNatters seems a good compromise.
With a barrier before uploading on iNat.
Right up front - a reminder - CNC hosted on iNat is not a computer game - scientists would like to use your data - please iNat thoughtfully - thank you!
Date and particularly location correct? I get a trickle of obs ‘in Africa’ which are clearly NOT.
Tell us what you were looking at - even if you cannot name it as such - this ‘black dot’ is a beetle.
If you do - add an ID - a popup to check distribution - your obs is in Texas, this sp is found in Chad, are you sure? Geomodel Anomaly (health warning - filter to your location - there are about 2 million obs waiting there) is useful for catching these
Annotate - if you can - flowers / larva …
For these shiny newbies - a popup when you Agree - mm this is NOT a Like button, can you tell us WHY you call it this?
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I think bulk tagging tools are 100% necessary before I’ll spend any more significant time helping fix some of the CNC issues. Like you, I feel like the scale of the problem is just too overwhelming when tagging issues one obs at a time.
At a bare minimum there should be a way for curators to bulk-tag captive/cultivated observations as well as those that should not be research-grade (ID can be improved). This would go a long way to make the problem more manageable.
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I think iNat already does that, but identifiers are the ones who have to discover the sock puppets and other fraudulent observations. I’m sure iNat staff do some identifying during the CNC, but they can’t possibly look at all three-million-plus observations during those ten days. Neither can all the rest of the identifiers, for that matter.
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One million obs in a single day needs, not a team with buckets and shovels, but one of those monster machines from mining!
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The leading project in Bolivia has been flagged. Never seen that red flag warning at the bottom of a project before.
The obs no longer show up as in a project.
2 of the organisers have done no IDs for CNC (one has done NO IDs at all)
A bit sad all round.
Would be interesting to sort the leaderboard by %RG it varies from 5% to 60% for Graz among the few I checked. Averaging around 40%
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2025
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Oh, my, that’s very interesting about a CNC project being flagged. I haven’t seen that before either. And I agree - a bit sad all around.
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I have been using @Megachile’s Universal Metadata Tool on the Identify page to mass-tag cultivated observations. It’s a bit slow, but I can now easily select dozens of observations and let the cultivated mark apply itself in the background as I do other tasks – including even more observation processing in other tabs or windows. I find it works very well for fundamental things like voting cultivated, though if you have a need for other automated actions, I’d certainly suggest talking to Adam about it. (Perhaps you already knew of this tool, but for anyone who didn’t…)
5 Likes