How long after discovery have the weeds or parasites been in the captive environment? If you know you have weeds/parasites and you don’t eradicate/remove them, you’ve chosen to tend them. That captive environment is under your control. I weed my vegetable garden. Certain individuals may be spared for various reasons; pretty weed, I’m lazy, bird food, habitat for other species, etc. They’re now part of the garden since I provide water, compost, fencing, safe haven from the lawn mower, etc.
So in the iNat world, observations of something new in my garden that I didn’t plant are wild (although they may not live much longer). Once I choose to let it live in my tended space and it’s existing while other individuals are killed or removed, observations of persisting residents are captive.
Unless you deliberately planted the plant, the plant remains wild throughout its entire lifetime (and beyond if it’s observed after it died, I suppose).
If you don’t tend your weeds, simply unwilling to kill them doesn’t make them captive, or everything you see becomes captive, if you see weeds as your garden plants, water them specifically and kill things around them, that is a captive weed, but it sounds quite weird.
Even if the weed is being watered and pruned I would still consider it wild, because it enstablished itself in its environment independently from the help it’s being provided with, much like a wild and independent bird who takes advantage of feeders, nestboxes and birdbaths.
It was discussed many times and I’m totally opposed to @raymie view on that, have no will to discuss it the 10th time, nurishing the plant, making it survival much more likely, is a significant change making the organism not wild. If you cut the grass around young tree sapling, put a guard around it and even add something that ties tree to that, so it doesn’t fall, doesn’t die from lack of sun, that tree is not wild anymore for sure.
Comparing plants to animals is wrong, they have totally different rules, plants can’t walk.
Whether an organism is wild or not is all about intention. There was no human intention as to the placement of the plant. If it can’t move, it doesn’t really matter if it is cared for later, as the placement of the organism is still the same.
If organism would die without human intervention, it’s not just living a wild life, there is an intention from humans to have this plant at this spot, and they actively support this placement (not just not touch it). If humans would not like it, they would move that plant, as they do, and in that scenario there’s usually even less actions from humans, they just move it from one spot to another, and new spot can be better or worse, no support comes afterwards. Saying a 1 metre move is a bigger deal for a plant that watering, getting leaf-eaters off, killing things around, is just wrong.
Yeah well… this is what I do. It often agrees with iNat guidance. And when it doesn’t, meh. The data is secondary. Doing it my way increases my connection with nature (you know, the purpose of this project).