I see this is a topic brought up in 2019 with no intention to combine “organism is wild” with the cultivated/captivated, but is there a current way it is being used so I can use it more consistently? For instance, when I see something planted I use the option to mark it captivated/cultivated. But once it becomes research grade, I see there is an assessment of organism is wild.
If an observation is marked captivated/cultivated, it becomes Casual and cannot become Research Grade, unless someone counters your captivated/cultivated vote in the Data Quality Assessment. Is that what’s happening?
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In addition to what lynnharper said, there’s a known issue where a small number of observations somehow manage to be both captive/cultivated and Research Grade, but that’s a bug. Currently I see 11 of these in the whole site.
Anecdotally, I have a sense it’s related to the same user providing an ID that puts the observation to Research Grade and also voting that the organism is captive in the DQA.
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I had just stumbled upon the “organism is wild” for the first time. I’d wondered if I was using it or captivated/cultivated incorrectly when I marked it on someone else’s observations when they were posting in a particular region that I know is a large garden. So I wanted to make sure I was using it in the right application. Up until this point, I hadn’t been aware of whether it was research or casual grade.
In iNaturalist usage, they are just different terms for the same thing. If an organism is cultivated or captive, then it is not wild. If it is wild, it is not cultivated/captive.
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If a person intentionally put the organism where it is (e.g. planted it in a garden), it’s captive/cultivated. If the organism got itself there (including cases where people moved it there unintentionally, like weed seeds tracked in on boots), it’s wild. Sometimes the organism’s status changes within seconds (e.g. a wildlife rehabilitator is releasing a hawk; captive in the cage, wild once it leaves, because it chooses what direction to fly even though the person brought it to the area).
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As others have said, they are exactly the same. Checking the Captive/Cultivated box in the app or on the web upload page causes the “Organism is wild” to be voted 
on the webpage for the observation. It’s a little confusing that they use different terminology in both places, but I assume they wanted all the Data Quality Assessment statements to be positive, and “Organism is not captive/cultivated” is a bit clunky.
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Just remember that is possible for wild organisms to appear in a garden.
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