Sock puppet accounts are regularly banned and against the rules and terms. I don’t know why those behind the help account did not react, but as a curator you have a justified reason to suspend alt or clone accounts.
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This topic certainly isn’t a debate about “what’s wild and what isn’t”, but to answer the topic more specifically, you can only reach out to the user and explain the situation. If they do not comply and you genuinely believe they should not be using the specified annotation, you can bring others in to override it.
I hesitate to refer to wild/non-wild checks as “abuse” though, people just don’t usually understand. It feels like actual malicious intent is rare with that.
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You caught me, I’m not a curator, merely a nosey person here reading this thread on the curator’s forum category.
Well, I was curious. I think I found them. They are a curator and they’ve been doing this for years, apparently. The abuse is flagrant! I can really only reasonably review areas I’m familiar with but this is not acceptable conduct from a curator of all people.
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Curators can have their role taken away if they abuse their role. Best to raise these cases to the staff, or remove it yourself if you have good grounds to do so (which it sounds like is apparent here).
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If you have a copypasta to put in the notes up top - you can pre-empt (most) people from marking it as Cultivated. You know your context, but we as identifiers don’t.
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They also left a note on somebody’s account (indicating that person was wrong in some way) when that person called out that the observation they had marked as not captive was clearly captive. That comment was also hidden, which I don’t think is appropriate use of curator abilities. I don’t get what the big hubbub is about just marking it what it should be. It can still be valuable if it’s captive vs not. I wonder if this user needs help distinguishing between the two, but suggesting that to somebody might seem rude rather than helpful.
Does anybody know if somebody reached out to iNaturalist staff directly about this yet?
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That was my comment they hid! I didn’t/don’t know about notes, though. This is what I’m saying: they’ve been doing this for a while and for specimens that aren’t ambiguous. This is clearly against the rules, right?
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That clearly should be addressed to the staff, person doing it shouldn’t be a curator.
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I wanted to be discreet. Maybe I wasn’t good at it.
I flagged the comment but specified that I was flagging the fact that it was hidden, because I think hiding it wasn’t justified. I think I’m going to reach out to the person who made this post and ask if they have messaged iNaturalist staff or the help email. If they didn’t, I will.
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This discussion has gone a little off topic. We’re discussing a single user who has shown a pattern of deliberately misusing the DQA system to keep observations from being rightfully marked casual. This is not a place for the airing of general grievances over the lack of IDs provided for observations marked casual. (These grievances are also not relevant to this case as most of the problematic observations I am discussing have IDs and some are even research grade as a result of the improper “wild” flag.)
@anon83178471 has taken on notifying staff about this user. A flag exists for the improper hiding of @mertensia’s comment. And moderator notes (only visible to curators) about these issues have been added to their profile.
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Unfortunately, like identifications, captive/cultivated is often is subjective or falls in a gray area. We intend for users to be able to have civil, open discussions within these gray areas to change minds when possible, or just vote and and agree do disagree when not.
If there are examples where a user is objectively voting far outside of this gray area (e.g. voting wild on a hamster in a cage), and is exhibiting a pattern of doing this to a large number of observations, please flag the observations and hope that through these flags and the user’s moderation history curators can assess the circumstances. But its difficult to prove nefarious intent given that having differing opinions and choosing to not engage (particularly on one’s own observations) is permissible on iNat. Only in very extreme/objective situations (e.g. someone voting 100 caged hamsters in other people’s obs as wild would probably be fairly extreme/objective) is this behavior likely to be deemed to be a community guidelines violation (e.g. trolling). However, if other community guideline violations are involved (e.g. sockpuppeting or abusing curator priviliges please flag accordingly)
In this spirit, also, please make sure to politely reach out to a user in comments to ask why they made the determination they did giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are correct or at least that their opinion is valid, particularly if its the observer’s own observation and they may have additional information to share. But keep in mind that a user might not wish to engage which is regrettable but is permissible.
Be empathetic/sensitive that comments expressing differing opinions on identifications or captive/cultivated status can come off as invalidating (e.g. ‘this person’s opinion is obviously wrong’) particularly when they are aimed at an observer and may cause the user to disengage or double down on their controversial opinions. It’s always best to assume people are acting in good faith, try to politely engage them, but rely on community votes/IDs to outweigh situations where there’s strong community consensus and the someone chooses to not engage or won’t be swayed by the community.
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