You know there’s a difference in play as essential part of human existence and uploading thousands of observations just to delete them, for me this action is linked to a specific user, I know how you can destroy something out of current feelings, but I won’t believe people who do that don’t feel sorry about own actions later.
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To mangle that metaphor slightly, when you remove your own sandcastles by deleting your account, you also negatively impact the sandcastles of other users who built them on the foundation of your work, whether that is your IDs or your observations. That, to me, is a dreadful state of affairs to allow to happen.
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iNat doesn’t have total control over what GBIF keeps on their site - we create an export of observations for them every week and they can decide how to use them. But I imagine that when they ingest the next export we make for them, the observations will be removed. You’d have to ask them directly to confirm, however.
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What would you propose for further recognition of iders? Maybe make posts on them little bit more often? Obs of a day is found every day, but pieces on iders are rare and scarce.
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I also noticed a person who was a top IDer of Cerambycidae and the top observer of it as well, strange. It is a huge loss for our community of Cerambycid people as we try to go through the 150,000+ IDs they’ve made.
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I’ve delt with same situation, vanishing from the Internet, phone, and address (no letters delivered), in a different context… I still worry and wonder to this day about them. No obituary, no anything. Everyone who knew them, they went “poof” overnight. We were somewhere between aquatince and friends (I mean, we even texted every month or so, my letters were returned undeliverable as a last ditch effort to contact them) and I have no clue what happened to them. Everyone else we mutually knew, they disappeared to as well, on the same day, all contact ceased. Sometimes, it feels like they were a figment of my imagination, and we knew each other in person. If We had only known them online, it would be even more surreal.
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I do feel with iNat, that once I put my pictures here and ask for an ID - they become the property at least of the iNatters who visibly engage by adding IDs or comments.
Who OWNS the ID and comment that I leave on your obs? Not me, because you can choose to delete the obs.
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With online ‘imaginary friends’ unless you have met or spoken face to face, we cannot know if Sally who loves beetles in Texas (random example) actually exists.
For years I read a blog based out of Budapest. Which vanished overnight. I wondered if that was an author experimenting with a character for a future (or current) book. Book written and published. Backup research deleted now it no longer has any value, to them.
I am more wary now. That real person tricked me into setting up a Linked In account …
Out of idle curiosity - how many people on iNat do you absolutely know are real - met them face to face? I wouldn’t run out of fingers to count mine. Only one hand if I eliminate the Fynbos Ramblers I hike with each week) who are pre-iNat.
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Same thing has happened recently in the hoverflies. The longer iNat continues and grows, I presume this will become an issue more often.
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Your proposal has already many likes. Please create the feature request!
My guess is that no one owns anything. An ID or a short comment is likely not eligible to copyright. And even if it were, we should then check the iNat Terms of Use.
This is more a matter of policy than a matter of Terms of Use,
and more a matter of Terms of Use than a matter of rights (copyright or privacy).
By submitting Content to iNaturalist for inclusion on the Platform, You grant iNaturalist a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt, and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing, and promoting Your observations and journal via iNaturalist, and for the purpose of displaying or promoting the Content or iNaturalist itself in other venues, such as social media or software distribution platforms.
Content means everything: observations, IDs, comments.
Even the observations could be kept online.
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Think of a childhood book that affected you deeply. For me, it was Flowers for Algernon. I no longer own that book. In fact, I never owned it at all. I took it out of the classroom library when I was in sixth grade. I read it one time and here I am some forty years later and I can still tell you the plot but not without becoming a little emotional. Charlie Gordon springs to mind frequently, as his story was one of my earliest introductions to ethics. The book itself was but a borrowed moment and the details (what the cover looked like, how many pages it was) are erased, but the effects of having read it are lifelong.
So too is the knowledge I have gathered here. I find myself out in the world more confidently pointing at bees, at beetles, sometimes even knowing exactly what they are by scientific name. I know which leaves to smell and which not to touch.
If I deleted all my observations tomorrow, that knowledge would not suddenly disappear from my brain because by having made those observations and interacted with people who shared information, I am changed just as surely as I was by reading that book.
Now I must imagine if I disappeared tomorrow, what would my iNat impact be? Honestly, it would be nil as I truly have no unique scientific knowledge. The disappearance of my observations would be negligible as well, as they are common species and have not furthered science in any way. To be clear, this does not mean that making them was a waste of time; there is no way to tell who just enjoyed looking at one of my photos or which students might have honed their identification skills using my common species.
But what of the impact of someone else leaving? Beyond the previously discussed return to Needs Identification of some Research Grade observations, I mean, when someone leaves do they still have a residual effect on you? Do you feel yourself changed, maybe even bettered for having crossed paths with them? I think that is where the sadness comes from that @WeeCorbie referenced in his original post. And your worry @sunguramy.
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There’s no need for separate request, staff knows well about it, look at the link posted by OP, @tiwane in 2019 said they’re working on it, clearly they have no means to add it right now.
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There are many different points in your short response and this is why I am not convinced at all.
I didn’t find “OP” but followed the 1st link above.
The fact that they are “working on it” does not prevent us from requesting a precise feature (“A past user suggested … for this observation”). I didn’t mean “please work on it”, I meant “let’s vote for this solution”.
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You clearly found OP if you followed the link?
Sadly there’s a limited amount of votes per user, so this would be a request where votes will stay for years.
I didn’t find it.
I had a look on the former discussion on Google. I stopped reading because it’s too sad. Sad because many data are lost and sad because nothing (efficient) is done to prevent it.
Everything has been said already, yet the discussion goes on.
How many lost observations and IDs do we expect in 2023, considering how things move on?
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If we go on strike (obs. and IDs), it won’t change anything.
If we threaten to delete our accounts, it won’t change anything either.
Because the objective of iNat is to make people closer to nature, not to have a database of RG observations. However, if I were to delete my account, I think I would not remain as close to nature, because I would be less motivated.
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and Plestidon skinks in North America.
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That is a reason for most of deletions.
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A user is allowed to remove/change only his IDs, not IDs from other users.
As long as the user account exists, it is mandatory to have all his IDs linked to his account.
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My estimate, there are about 10 iNatters who I know and have known for years plus a few others I have briefly met in person. One or two may use the forum. Everyone else here, you might or might not actually exist in a physical form.
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