I am not sure if it is just by coincidence, but today, I found a lot of nonsense on iNat. In the first case, I am pretty sure some teacher told a class to download iNaturalist, because at around the same time and within a small area, there were a lot of observations of Bellis perennis, Lamium purpureum, and… kids who took selfies or were photographed by their classmates. I am not sure whether all images were taken with consent of the people displayed.
About an hour later, I was on iNat again, and I found more images of people from other locations, obviously not related to the first incident. Usually, the users behind these observations were quite new to iNat and only had a handful of bad observations. E.g., some observations with single pictures that containing 5 different species of plants.
What would be the appropriate response to this kind of content? Comment on the observation? Flag as inappropriate? Is there a way to get these people interested in using iNat in a way it is intended to be used (maybe someone has some experience with these situations)? Is it worth the effort to comment on each observation what should have been improved?
That’s normal for class observations, just id humans as humans and observations will be casual, if plants are planted mark them as cultivated (otherwise there’s nothing wrong in many users uploading the same organism, unless it’s a duplicate of their own observation, if so - flag them), if observations contain multiple species – id the common ancestor, mark “as good as can be” and leave a comment that they need to be split. You can copy&paste your comments, if it’s a flag situation it’s better to leave one, if it’s a 15th planted tree from the same user, you likely don’t need to add the comment again.
There’s no way to improve their ways without contacting teacher, if you can find out who it is. Those students are mostly forced to use website with little to no training and often techers also are new to the platform, it’s spring, so the whole new season will be full of such groups.
So no further action required (besides ID to closest level possible). It was just that today, I had the impression, iNat was flooded with such content. Next year this time, I know this is normal in spring. Thank you for the fast reply!
Depends on the problem, but yeah, if it’s something out of ordinary - id the best way you cab, mark if can be marked and go further, if you don’t feel like it’s for you to “clean” it, you can go further or change filters, because understandably not everyone feels ok seeing many observations of such kind.
iNat has many observations like that, but % of them is really low, they stood out because they’re out of line of what you expect, by leaving comments you can help some users improve, but it’s harder to achieve with children.