What is the appropriate response/action for a user uploading multiple duplicate images, organisms?

This is happening even during ordinary inat days, I just came across another user who has multiple separate observations of the same organism.

One way I could think of addressing the issue is to have an option “flag as duplicate observation”, and then inputting the links which lead to such duplicates. However due to the likelihood of many duplicate observations on a daily basis, and that taking action requires human-judgement it might not be the best idea. And then what sort of response would be appropriate? Make admins have the power to delete the duplicate observations? Having that lack of freedom may result in people not wanting to use the site, which isn’t a good thing.

Edit:
PS. Btw guys I am strongly against the suggestion posed in the second-last sentence. No way do I want admins to have that power.

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NEVER! Observations are the “property of the observer”, and who knows if/when they are coming back to finish what they started. DQA’s to make them easily filterable out of queries is all that is needed. I would be seriously angry if anyone deleted any of my observations, regardless of the reason. I would be gone in a heartbeat.

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No ill-feelings over your suggestion, just trying to express strongly enough my alarm at the possibility!

The last sentence to my post was actually my response to that thought…so essentially I even am in agreeance with your “NEVER!” I definitely wouldn’t want that to happen.

my apologies, I did mis-read the comment! Looking at the whole paragraph I see the context now… :)

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INat has always been really good about not doing that stuff, compared with certain other sites, which is part of why I chose it.

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Sorry for responding to an old topic, but I felt it was better than starting a new topic.
There is a particular user who, throughout the years, has duplicated many observations. The highest I’ve seen this user duplicate an individual is 13 times (and counting). I have left many comments on their observations as well as a few tags, but I’ve never received any response and they’re still duplicating to this day. I’m pretty sure that they’re doing this to all their observations (not just owls) as I just checked a random species and saw that some were duplicates. What is the best way to handle this? They have over 8,000 observations, so manually flagging the observations would be a lot, and wouldn’t change the fact that they’re still duplicating observations. Should I just send their username to help@inaturalist.org?

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Very strange. Yes, please send us some examples at help@inaturalist.org.

I sent the email.

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I realize this is an old topic, but I am confused on flagging duplicates.

It is suggested by knowledgable curators both in the solution post quoted and in the boilerplate provided at https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses#dupe for exact duplicates that they may be flagged

but if you actually do click to flag an observation, the site text says it shouldn’t be used for duplicates:

According to the latest posts, it seems like really egregious examples would be better addressed by sending an email to help@inaturalist.org, which makes me wonder if there is ever a purpose for flagging as a duplicate , instead of either commenting and crossing your fingers, or emailing staff directly?

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I’m not positive, but I believe that text may have been added after this came up.

It is true there is nothing curators can do with the flags. The one thing it does do is remove the research grade setting from the record as any observation flagged gets set as casual until the flag is resolved.

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Hmm, seems like a DQA setting for duplicate might be a better solution (removes RG without adding flags that are impossible for curators to resolve).
I can see drawbacks to a DQA too, though. They’re a little too easy to toggle, especially when people assume duplicates that actually aren’t. Then again, they’re easier to overturn than a flag is to resolve…which again can be both a good thing or a bad thing.

In any case, would the preferred method for dealing with duplicates be to leave a comment and hope for the best, or send an email to staff if it’s particularly bad? It doesn’t seem like flagging is particularly useful for duplicates.

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After this feature request along those lines was closed in July 2019 (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/create-a-way-to-flag-duplicate-observations-and-remove-rg-status-from-the-extras/201), I sent this reponse privately, but I’ll post it here (lightly modified :)


In a lot of cases the observations shouldn’t even be merged though. One just needs to be deleted. I would estimate in >95% of instances folks do not follow up on their duplicates or other data quality issues. This will only be a very, very minor help.

Duplicates are a huge pain in the butt for identifiers. Anything that makes the identification process slower and more frustrating is a major data issue.

We’ve been flagging them for years. The “acceptable” observation is the one that is oldest or isn’t flagged.

I plan on continuing to flag duplicates as I see them in order to remove them from the Identify pool. This will continue to make the flags page unwieldy and difficult to manage.

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Yes, I saw the previous topic (I’d even liked some comments there before), but as you pointed out it is closed (and I’m out of votes anyway).

Or sometimes, the more complete one. I’ve occasionally seen duplicates where the first one is missing date or location, but the duplicate has the photo and the other required info. I’ll leave a comment on the “original” suggesting the user delete it, as the “duplicate” is already complete.

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I beg the team to provide a solution (a new feature in the iNaturalist web application, not by asking us to contact the observer) to prevent at least these cases (when an observer attemps to upload several times the same picture to different observations). Thanks a lot.

In some cases the intention is to identify the different organisms in the same picture. This is an exception to be handled by the solution.

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Related feature request (for preventing the issue):
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/duplicate-prevention-notify-observers-if-their-image-checksums-match-others-on-the-site/258

Some sort of Request Merge option that would make it easy for a user to accept a merging request by identifiers of observations would be useful. Often I just try to find something else in the images to ID if they post several of the same organism.

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