Because of the way the pro-delete crowd use GPDR as a blanket, despite your excellent efforts at highlighting the nuance involved, viz.
I am entirely in agreement with your views, that full post is excellent.
Then there is the ambiguity that exists around users’ IDs and comments. A photo and the related observation are one thing, but once a user interacts with another user in contributing to an ID, the right to remove evidence of that interaction on an open, volunteer website seems a bit far-fetched. Especially given the alternative pathways that you and I have listed in this thread for data to be retained elsewhere.
Conclusion : an old ID is still visible, it doen’t count anymore (similar to a simple comment) but we can still “agree” with it (it still shows a taxon name and link, and an “Agree” button).
Either this becomes a new iNat feature (optimal solution), or, if allowed, we do it on our own as suggested by @sedgequeen, using a software for automating the many similar actions (suboptimal solution).
I think there’s an ethical discussion to be had around that. If a user wants their body of work deleted, and iNat supports that request for deletion, should someone else essentially undo the impact by duplicating the results under someone else’s name? I wouldn’t call it plagiarism, but it certainly seems to rhyme.
…or using a separate account, with a username like “id-recovery-5”, and only iNat staff and the volunteers knowing who has used this account. No abuse of “credit”.
Anyway, the preferred solution will always remain a new iNat feature.
And the worst solution will always remain the statu quo.
I think we could deal with this adequately by putting up a warning saying something like “Identification you have made for others on iNaturalist will be retained. If you feel it necessary to delete them, please contact the help desk.” We can leave those ID’s as ID’s.
I would agree, except that if fixing it properly is going to happen sometimes in the theoretical and distant future, we should fix it with a hack now. We can always improve it later.
If iNat thinks it’s acceptable to do so, then fill your boots.
Not wishing to solutioneer too much, but to avoid meeting a reasonable definition of plagiarism too closely you’d probably also need to consider how to properly attribute the ID to the original IDer.
Then you’d need to concern yourself about the impact of all those automated IDs on the leaderboards.
Also consider whether iNat’s backend user analytics would be detrimentally skewed by these robotic IDs.
How is plagiarism is linked to it? Most new users just click agree on any id they get, no matter how correct it is, are they just commiting an act of plagiarism when they do that? An id is not a property you can sue someone over. There’s no difference if it’s done by a machine or a different person creates an account and goes through all of your ids and copies them.
Because the activity described comes pretty close to meeting a reasonable definition of plagiarism. See page 5.
Probably a grey area. I think as long as the original ID they agreed with is still there, then it’s obvious that their agreeing ID came later so one could infer…some relationship between the two. If the original ID has been deleted from an obs and a human comes along to ID it again from scratch, they are having to make an effort to do so, rather than passing off someone else’s effort as their own.
Who’s talking about law suits?
Quite. If a person copied your efforts, claimed them as your own and didn’t give you credit, that would be pretty close to the definition of plagiarism. Therefore if a computer program did the same, that would be pretty close to the definition of plagiarism too.
A key aspect of avoiding accusations of plagiarism is not passing off someone else’s work as your own. The standard solution to this is to attribute the effort to its creator(s). That’s basic academic practice.
If you can’t or won’t do this, then (in my opinion) the shadow of plagiarism will hang over your solution. If I were iNat, that would send shivers down my spine as it would affect their reputation.
And who’s here talking about plagiarism? If it’s not illegal what’s the reason you brought that up? Cause that’s what I thought, morally I don’t see this as a problem.
I really doubt that plagarism is involved in leaving identifications in, or in changing the account name to some variation of “deleted account” – which would make it clear that nobody else is taking credit for the identifications.
There’s often a difference between legal and ethical. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Academia takes a very dim view on plagiarism, even if it isn’t illegal. I am saying that it should be considered as a risk to the reputation of iNat, and discussed. That’s how positions are formed.
We clearly have different views on the matter. Life’s rich tapestry, etc.
For avoiding any “smell of plagiarism”, we ask the person that closes their account to choose between (1) keeping their IDs as is, or (2) anonymizing their IDs and excluding them from the Community Taxon computation.
In the case (1), technically the account is not deleted (because it is mandatory that the IDs remain linked to the account, with the username unchaged). The account is only “locked” for ever (the user will not be allowed to log in again).