A very large part of the value of an ID is … WHO made that ID?
What value do I put on that ID?
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for example ‘anyone’ can ID a skink. But I don’t know what plestidon is, so I would like the ID to come with background and history. This identifier observes and / or identifies skinks, and knows whereof they speak.
Not like the unnamed identifier yesterday … two IDs, no obs, and disagreed with one of my trusted identifiers. Which ID do I value? The one with reputation or the unproven newbie? Or the someone once said this was that ??
I realize that this issue, besides the legal one, has a more complicated ethical side. And I am not an expert in copyright law.
But if the license under which a user posted content (e.g., the “default” CC BY-NC) allows free use – may that content be saved and re-posted by another user (with appropriate attribution)? At least technically, I don’t see this as a violation of either the Terms of Use or the Creative Commons license. Could it be possible to save content that is important to biodiversity knowledge?
I have never considered deleting my account or any content (apart from clearly erroneous or redundant). But I quite deliberately chose the license (and am even thinking of “upgrading” it to the freer CC BY). In doing so, hoping, among other things, that it might be some kind of “protection” for the freedom to use my content, even if for some reason I make some disruptive decision in the future. I don’t understand why this might happen, but the future is hard to predict. Sometimes people do things that are strange to others for unexpected reasons.
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That’s the awkward dualism in iNat. It’s actually both. Or it tries to do both. I view it as a database, as well as an interactive educational tool for those interested in organisms. The database part relies heavily on the participation of those who are already into nature and who provide expertise in IDing, curating, and managing the site. But those same individuals have the ability to withdraw all the information they’ve contributed to the site, should they choose to do so. I don’t know of another archival site for data that has that feature.
Consider how iNat is often advertised as a source for scientific information, how it is referenced in scientific papers and used by citizen scientists and biologists alike. If data can be erased because a prominent user deletes their account, how stable is it as a source?
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Which is developer speak meaning they’re not really working on it with any degree of urgency. This is not a 3 year change.
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Well, read between the lines, they know the problem, it’s not gonna be solved any soon, with how major stuff is being actually in process for years, it’s pretty obvious, there’re only ten people working.
Well, this post did indeed have an emotional impact. I fell asleep thinking of a formerly active iNatter and dreamed of assisted suicide and a chickadee that was dead – oops, not dead but I needed to save it.
I think we should have the right to delete all our photos if we want to. However, the comments and identifications are gifts to the community in a different way. Although we need the ability to delete individual comments and identifications, we should not be able to delete them all when we delete an account. We need to keep them and we should be able to keep them.
How about this? When someone deletes an account, the process includes this choice: Do you want your identifications to retain your username or do you want them anonymized?
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I think it’s quite understandable to mourn the disappearance of a user and to feel discombobulated by this. I also mourn the loss of knowledge and expertise that accompanies such account deletions.
I’m going to reiterate some of what I said in another thread before it went off track.
Given that this has happened repeatedly in the last several months, I want to second the plea for some other way for deletion of accounts to be handled. It’s not just the issue that literally thousands of observations now need to be re-IDed, but that there’s no way of telling which observations those are, and in many cases the history of ID refinements, alterations, etc. has also been erased.
The fact that there is no trace whatsoever that an ID was once there is fairly disturbing. One questions one’s own memory – hadn’t someone suggested a different/more specific ID for that observation, or am I imagining it? Something changed, and yet there is no record whatsoever of what happened.
This strikes me as a bit unusual; discussion forums, comment threads, etc. that I am familiar with on other websites don’t typically simply delete content without a trace in such cases; there is generally some indication that someone deleted something or the content from a deactivated user has been removed. I see the IDs and comments connected with an observation as a form of discussion, and removing parts of that discussion may make it incoherent.
The fact that iNat is not just a social community, but also a collection of data that is used for scientific purposes, makes this deletion practice even more troublesome.
Even just a line of text replacing the vanished ID or comment to indicate that content has been deleted (without a user name or indication of what the specific ID was) would be a big improvement. If iNat staff prefer as a matter of principle to provide users options for completely deleting all past account activity, including IDs, it seems to me that a note of this type would fulfill this requirement and at least alert users to the fact that something is missing. (I would prefer the ID to at least be displayed, but I would settle for “an ID/comment by an inactive user was here”).
Second, while I agree that it isn’t appropriate to speculate about why a specific user might have deleted their account, I do think that such instances should give us cause to take a hard look at whether there is something not working the way it should on iNat. Account deletion by active users should not be a regular occurrence, particularly given the repercussions that this has for the collective database. Obviously we can’t know what those reasons are, but most of the possibilities I can think of are quite concerning.
Either the account deletions are impulsive and users don’t really understand that account deletion results in deletion of all previous activity, or there are some very powerful reasons for deleting their account rather than just logging out and never returning.
In the first case, I find it hard to imagine that a user in good standing suddenly wakes up one morning and decides “I don’t feel like using iNat anymore, I’m going to delete my account along with the thousands of IDs I have spent hundreds of hours making”. However, I suppose it is possible that some users do delete their accounts impulsively because they are upset about something and potentially regret this decision later on. If this applies to a significant percentage of deleted accounts, it might make sense to implement a “cooling off period” of, say, a week or so, before which the account deletion is not final.
What particularly worries me is the possibility that some of these account deletions are not the result of a one-off argument or personal, non-iNat related reasons like stalking, but rather the outcome of long-standing conflicts that could not be resolved via other means, or of persistent issues of feeling unwelcome/unwanted etc. I haven’t been aware of this happening, but if it is a factor in the recent instances, then we collectively need to figure out what we can change so that users don’t decide that account deletion is their only option.
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Several dozen for me. But that’s because iNat echoes my professional world as a biologist and these fellow academics are also at conferences, workshops, talks, grad school, faculty, etc.
Unfortunately I also know a real person who deleted their account (with many good IDs), because they butted heads with some of iNat’s structural flaws (like this) too often and let it get to them. This is a good point.
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Users that I’ve met multiple times or remember strongly/spent a lot of time talking to, probably between 10 and 20. A lot of the local native plant club members and the local land conservancy volunteers are iNat users. I wouldn’t really call them my close friends, but I do small group activities with them at least once a month, or more in the spring.
Users that I’ve met in person briefly, sometimes without even getting their iNat user name, those might number up to a hundred… I am often surprised and amused to find how micro-famous I am in certain circles, and how much people who know my face and iNat name enjoy “blowing my cover” and announcing my presence at group activities.
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What’s also bizarre and disorienting for me is that after an iNat account has been deleted, the user name itself is back up for grabs. I know at least one case where a name I remember belonging to a fairly prominent user is now again existing but as a new user who made 20 obs in 3 months last spring and hasn’t signed in since.
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Really? Best choice of words?
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Ah, yes! Recently in the herbarium a visitor suddenly realized, “You’re Sedgequeen!” I was embarrassed at how absurdly pleased I was.
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I do know of one case of someone who impulsively deleted their account and was appalled to realize that all their photos and identifications were deleted as a result. At the very least, we should make it clear to people deleting that this will happen! (Until it’s fixed.)
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To be clear, it’s not the only goal - it’s one of two long-time main goals (help people engage with nature and generate scientifically usable data), but when/if the two are in conflect we weighed the the former over the latter.
This is what you’re shown when you choose to delete your account, so while the decision may or may not be impulsive, the impact of deleting one’s account is pretty transparent.
For what it’s worth, leaving an anonymized ID presents some more decisions to make when it comes to functionality, such as whether the anonymized ID remains “active” (i.e. counts in the community taxon algorithm), what to do if the user wants their account back, etc. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be implemented, just that there are policy decisions beyond any technical implementation.
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I have to admit, this discussion has had a sobering effect on me. I’ve often argued to skeptical colleagues in biology that iNat is an important data source that should be considered alongside other sources such as physical museum collections and publications. But I’m having second thoughts about that. All things are impermanent but some are more long-lasting than others.
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The fact that IDs disappear when users delete their account is partly why I sometimes add ID to observations that already have Research Grade status. This is to prevent these observations from moving back to ‘Needs ID’.
I don’t plan on ever deleting my account, so there’s that.
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Is this one about catenatus?
Apologies, I didn’t mean it to be offensive, I will edit it. I meant “stranger to me” but I will just say “new user.”
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I’m glad to see this dialogue box for people deleting accounts. I heard about the person who impulsively deleted her account from her employer, who was appalled because she was working on his project through iNaturalist. Perhaps she knew what would happen. (Perhaps not. Amazing what we can not notice, sometimes.)
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