Thoughts on Improving Transparency of DQA Votes

General
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A lot of replies ahead my first time reading this. So, apologies if mine is unhelpful.

My practice here is to use the Observation Field Duplicates Observation, which takes the URL of the “original”, main Observation. Usually, I’ll select the first of two or more uploaded as the duplicated observation. It could also be the “best” observation: clearest, more photos showing features, etc.

The scenarios I typically come across that give rise to duplicates are:

  • Bioblitzes
  • Field Trips
  • Class projects. (Always in the context of a class project created by the educator. If there are others concerns or issues, I reach out to them and direct them to the Educator’s Guide.)

I do not downvote for this. I may leave a comment, especially for a newer user, or if there are other questions I have. The field gives future researchers the abilty to avoid overcounting numbers of observed individual or groups of organisms. If the focus of the research is not the organism, all information remains.

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Three in a row. For some of us, that just makes us more curious what point you were making. I disagree with Discourse’s decision not to allow those of us who choose to do so to see hidden posts; I do not find it to be in keeping with open dialogue. But there is nothing iNaturalist staff can do about that. Let us hope that the Forums can remain open to differing points of view. But at this point, it is clear that whatever you were saying is not going to be allowed to stand, so if it was me, I would save the effort and let it go.

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Issues with moderation should be posted to Forum Feedback but I’ll make a short reply here. Then please let’s stay on topic.

I was the person who flagged and hid the messages above. The first for being inappopriate, the others for being off-topic as they were about the original post being hidden. As is the case with any flagged/hidden post, the first time it’s hidden the person who posted it is given a chance to edit it and it will be unhidden (or at least that’s how it should work. If it isn’t maybe there’s a bug). The poster here has so far chosen to not that, thus the post remains hidden. But it was mostly a broad condemnation and denigration of society as a whole and not related to DQA vote transparency.