Am I the only one who thinks it’s kind of fun sometimes to look at what is clearly just a landscape shot and go ‘hmm… oh look there’s a lupine!’ ID: genus lupinus?
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I do sympathise with the pictures I have seen in the last few days
river - sunset - rocks and stones - landscape.
This site is called I-natur-alist. And those are undeniably nature.
It is not called I-biolog-ist. It isn’t obvious at the outset that iNat expects you to see animal / plant / mushroom / seaweed / etc.
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The user in this case was banned. Generally once a user gets more than a few copyright flags, suspension is on the horizon. Hence why I will put in a serious effort to find photos that I suspect were stolen.
However, even once a user is suspended, his observations are all still up, whether they are his or someone else’s. In many cases, including a couple of his, the pinned location is what raised a red flag on the observation in the first place. It is not a disservice to the community to clean it out. It is however a disservice to other identifiers who will now spend time on the observation, which is likely stolen.
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I think I have too when going through unknowns.
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A tangential version of this I’ve been encountering today when going through some older observations is when “Can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?” has been marked yes for no clear reason despite numerous identifiers (often including the OP) appearing to all agree at the same species-level ID. This leads an agreement to still be sitting in the “needs ID” pile unnecessarily.
One thing that occurred to me seeing this was, “do people understand exactly what their vote means?” After a bit of searching I finally found https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000169936, which I didn’t know existed despite identifying for a few years now (I mostly learned through following posts on the forum, but that’s not something that everyone does nor should we expect them to).
I would recommend that there be more elaboration more easily accessible. Maybe hovering over a DQA field for voting could bring up a small text box providing a slight bit more context? Or maybe the fields could be directly hyperlinked to the help page? I know that many of the fields are pretty self-explanatory (e.g., “date is accurate”), but for the fields that benefit from extra explanation (e.g., “evidence related to a single subject”) it doesn’t seem immediately available.
Of course, many would still probably ignore the info. Nevertheless, improved accessibility/transparency seems to me like it can only help.
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On the Identify page, click on the ‘Filters’ option to the right of the Go button, then select ‘Casual’ in the top-left corner. ‘Needs ID’ is selected by default, but if you select either ‘Casual’ or ‘Research Grade’, you can then de-select ‘Needs ID’.
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Thing is, a lot of identifier annoyances like too large area, multiple organisms across photos, duplicates, etc, are due to new users or mistakes. Some of these will be fixed. I have asked a lot of people to remove extra photos, or fix locations, and talked them through the fix. Afterward, their observation stopped being Casual. However, there are also a large number of student or CNC observations where the observer is never going to log back in again.
Since we require a certain ID precision for an observation to be RG, why not also require an area precision?
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On the other hand, why? In most cases, the observation is approximately where it’s said to be, whatever the accuracy says. And if somebody cares about the accuracy circle, they can download the data and sort on that feature.
Same! The consensus on other threads on the forum has been that if a photo shows many species, and the observer is non-responsive about which one they want to ID, the identifier can just pick one and put it in as an ID. I do this a lot too- ID wetlands as “Typha sp” if they have lots of cattails, pick a flower or tree that’s identifiable in the landscape and ID it, etc. Any ID of an organism visible in the picture is more useful than relegating the observation to Casual.
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Agreed. The only time I make a DQA vote and don’t leave a comment myself is if another user has already added a comment explaining the problem. An observation with a DQA downvote and no comment from anyone explaining the issue really is a problem.
I have also seen this issue. Observers report a correction that I am not seeing on my end. I have thought about doing a bug report, but they aren’t my observations and I’ve worried about running afoul of the rule against posting problem observations. I suspect it is a syncing issue. The problem is, when I get the comment and the issue isn’t fixed, I don’t think I should update the DQA. If it is fixed later after the syncing updates, I will not get notified.
When I am reviewing casuals, aside from captive/cultivated and missing observation dates, the next most common issue I see is a DQA for inaccurate location. There are 2 scenarios:
- A really big bubble with a random central location, to which I agree with @sedgequeen’s assessment that the location of the pin is likely close to accurate.
- A central pin/location that is the default for a named place or area. For Yellowstone National Park, this location is near the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake. The result is things like mountain goats appearing on the map at West Thumb where they do not exist.
If iNat does not want the location DQA used in these situations it would be helpful to have that in an official iNat statement - similar to the clarification for the multiple species DQA.
It would also be helpful for Explore to have a positional accuracy filter, similar to Identify. That would give end users a way to filter out observations they find annoying due to large accuracy bubbles.
I personally add comments for my DQA votes and include “Please comment if you fix it.” However, the systemic solution is observer notification of their observation becoming casual. An interesting consideration is if observers should be notified if they DQA their own observation. Mistakenly checking captive/cultivated is the most common, but I don’t think it would be good to have an annoying pop-up for checking that box.
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No, by making observations with suspected stolen content casual instead of flagging for copyright violation, you are virtually guaranteeing that the stolen content will never be removed.
It is true that by making observations casual, you are taking the observation out of the “needs ID” pool for most (not all!) IDers and preventing the observation from becoming RG.
However, the reason stolen content is a problem is not because they represent bad data (in some few cases the user may have actually seen the organism in question at that place and time and is using someone else’s photo because they could not get one of their own), but because using photos that are not one’s own is a violation of other norms, including other people’s right to have their content credited to them and not to someone else.
As I understand it, suspension can be applied in various ways – normally a user’s content is left, but if there are compelling reasons why it should be removed, this may also be considered. Or staff may have a way to flag the observations en masse instead of individually if a case can be made for why all the user’s observations are suspect. Or discussion might lead to a consensus that it is OK to flag observations for copyright in this particular case without doing the research to determine where a particular image was stolen from if it is consistent with the pattern of the user’s other stolen photos (e.g., odd locations).
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The current example doesn’t support that. I check Casuals occasionally, as do other identifiers. I found these while Casual, and I’m the 2nd identifier mark his last bee Casual.
I do not agree at all here: it is absolutely bad data. Unless you have spent some time studying a taxa, than I do not care if you think someone else’s photo “looked like” what you saw. The reason we usually catch people making copyright violations is because the picture they found on the internet was across an ocean from their location. In the case of my example: he had one that I couldn’t find where he stole it from, about 500 miles from where it should be. That is very much bad data.
He has 450 copyright flags out of 1399 observations. The issue is I’m working with the tools provided to me, but the solutions you suggest are all theoretical.
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I also often look through the “unknowns” in the casual pool for my location and there are a few more categories to deal with there, the most common one being humans or human artifacts marked “captive” without giving them an ID. That’s annoying because just adding an ID of “Homo sapiens” would more effectively render them casual without polluting the “captive/cultivated” pool with these where someone else then has to pull them out and ID them properly.
Lots of these in the “unknowns” as well, particularly annoying if there is no indication from the person who made the mark why they made it. Some folks comment “duplicate” but don’t provide a link to check on the duplicate. For those without comments it’s a complete guess that maybe “getting rid of a duplicate” was behind dumping it into the casual pool for others to scratch their head over.
I’ve seen this on obscured observations as well, which is even more of a head-scratcher. How can you even tell the marked location is inaccurate if it is only visible to the observer? I suspect these might be cases of someone not understanding how the obscuration system works.
To be fair, there is no notification that happens in these cases unless the observer comments on what they did. As others have said, making a comment when marking things asking them to comment when they fix it might help, but not everyone does that either. When I come across these, I will often vote against the original DQA mark and add a comment saying something along the lines of “this appears to have been fixed” so people can check and let me know if it’s still wrong. It would be nice to see some sort of automatic notification.
I think this one actually makes sense in some cases. E.g. habitat shots like the observer photographed a tree with a comment “there was a cardinal singing here” but no sound file nor is the bird visible in the picture. They put an ID for the bird though and clearly intended it to be a record of them hearing the bird. Disagreeing on this by putting an ID of the tree on it would mess with the observer’s intent of having it as a record for the bird, so downvoting “evidence of organism” to make it casual but leaving the bird ID I feel would be more in line with the intent of the observation. Ideally, they probably should have made an observation without media, or there should be a way to mark photos as habitat photos.
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As I can easily find multiple recent instances of others’ observations you yourself have ID and marked ‘not wild’ while not adding a comment explaining you have done so, I guess you must mean it is rude to add a non-commented DQA vote without also adding an ID (which I don’t find unreasonable), but I’m not certain that is clear from this statement.
I too have found that people are less likely to mark planted native species as ‘cultivated’ and more likely to mark introduced species the same without considering habitat/context/location, which is indeed a problem. I suppose the iNat auto-marker for taxa that are over 80% ‘captive/cultivated’ in an area would actually be considered an example of the latter, but I find that a reasonable tradeoff for species that meet those criteria, even if it does mean IDers who are interested in those taxa now need to look through the ‘captive/cultivated’ observations and counter-vote the iNat marking if it does indeed appear ‘not wild’ to them.
To clarify, I support having DQA votes generate notifications. I always add a comment if I make a DQA vote for anything other than ‘not wild’, though I often do for the latter, especially new users. My patience for adding comments, however, grows thin for prolific observers in my area (10,000+ observations) who consistently make no distinction between wild and not wild organisms.
I might also suggest that DQA problems vary very much depending on whether one is primarily concerned with lepidoptera (as with the original poster) versus plants or reptiles or whatever. The exasperation of plant IDers with cultivated plants not being marked as such (as evidenced by the multitude of forum posts on the topic) is a reflection of the magnitude of the difference of that problem compared to the amount of, e.g., insects or fungi being marked as ‘not wild’. When I say I’m hesitant to add roadblocks to users marking observations as ‘not wild’, that’s the context I’m coming from. (And for what it’s worth, it’s why I also support disentangling ‘captive/cultivated’ from the other ‘casual’ DQA categories, which is a long-standing feature request.)
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So you check casuals “occasionally” and two people marked an observation that you both think has stolen content as casual. How does this disprove my point that marking as casual is not achieving the goal of actually removing the stolen content?
If an observation is casual, particularly if it is casual because it has been marked as “location incorrect” or “date incorrect”, it may not occur to the few people who do look at casuals that the problem with the observation is actually copyright violation and not incorrect metadata, so unless they happen to be familiar with the user and their history, it is reasonable that they might think that correct action has already been taken and not investigate further.
I’m not saying that you should simply do nothing about such observations – obviously something needs to happen so that other people don’t waste their time on them and so that they don’t become RG. But making them casual doesn’t solve the real problem.
I am not saying it is OK for users to use someone else’s photo to represent what they saw – it is still copyright violation. But in some percentage of cases users do seem to be choosing a photo because they think it is the same as something they saw; they aren’t just making it up completely.
This is of course not the same thing as whether they are correct about what they saw. They may well be, if it is a common/easily recognized species. Or they may not be. Just as in the case of an observation without any data, it is not possible to verify what they actually saw, except in a very general sense of assessing whether that species at that time and place is plausible.
However, observations with stolen material are not faulty for the same reasons that an observation with genuine material and wrong associated date/location data is faulty. Casual =/= casual
My point is that there are other people who may have more tools available, and that it may be possible to find a solution if the situation is communicated to them. This is also a tool that regular users have at our disposal for issues we cannot solve ourselves. Unless you have tried this and been told that it is not allowed/not possible, I don’t see why choosing to investigate some course of action that would actually have a chance of solving the underlying problem (i.e., actually removing presumed copyrighted content instead of just making it casual) is something to be dismissed out of hand as merely “theoretical”.
(I’ll note that there is no actual requirement that one provide documentation of the specific source when flagging a photo as a copyright violation. It is good practice, yes, and I am absolutely not advocating that one should flag photos without being able to provide compelling reasons about why one believes they are not the user’s own images, but from a technical standpoint the system does not require one to enter a comment or a source.)
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Well, I’m using comment loosely here. I usually put the text in the actual ID, since as you point out, I’m almost always making an ID anyway. Perhaps that’s what you meant? I’m unsure how you found these observations or what you’re referring to.
It’s also possible there were a small number of cases where I forgot or was lazy. I’m definitely not perfect but I still think it’s a good practice to leave some kind of notification with a text explanation.
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Agreed! And we may have to agree to disagree on whether comments should be made mandatory. :)
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Yeah, I’ve also definitely added a vote without commenting if someone else had already added a comment explaining the issue. It seems that some users will add “split these observations up please” or “I think this date is wrong” comments, but without actually voting on the DQA. I can understand why someone may do this- namely that the observer will sometimes fix the problem and not know how to vote on the relevant DQA or even understand that the DQA has been “downvoted”, so the fixed observation will remain casual; I think this makes some users hesitant to touch the DQA votes at all. Yet another situation that could be helped by the DQA votes resulting in some sort of automated message/notification from iNat to the observer with an explanation of the logistics of how to fix the problem.
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I agree that it is good to leave comments, but realistically, it is not always necessary.
I’ve been working down the backlog of “Unknown” observations in my state, and with a little experience during obligatory school project season it is really not that hard to identify certain accounts where the observers are never going to see any comments that I leave, much less respond to them. (For example, because they are elementary school kids using a shared account, and no responsible adult seems to be following up at all.)
I give individual students the benefit of the doubt and leave them comments anyway, but there are some cases where leaving a comment is just making the commenter feel any better, without communicating anything to the observer.
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