What to do with users who consistently misidentify?

I think that many of these bad identifiers are not malicious but simply ignorant of natural sciences and thus try to identify something just for superficiality or because it can be cool to see the things change due to their identification.
I think that in these cases, given the iNat current policy, after having tried to get in contact with them in order to make them reason, one possibility is to ask other users, if available, to correct these bad identifications.
Anyway, what to do if these issue regards a massive quantity of observations (more than 100?)?

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Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

“Stupidity” is a little harsh … let’s say ignorance or inexperience.

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You systematically go through the observations and correct them. @alisonnorthup and I did this for several Ligustrum species found in Texas. If you become good enough at it, you subscribe to new identifications of that taxon, and you correct the ones you can, question the ones you can’t confirm, and confirm (in other words, agree with) any that you can confirm.

Since we started, many people have gotten better at recognizing Ligustrum japonicum, L. lucidum, L. sinense, and L. quihoui.

We’ve also learned that unlike the other three, L. japonicum does not tend to escape cultivation, let alone be invasive, in much of North America. I have no idea why.

This is a powerful feature of iNaturalist, and it is important that we use it. Without reviewing and confirming, questioning, or correcting each observation identified as one of these species, we would not have been able to say with confidence that L. japonicum should be removed from the many lists of invasive species on which it appears. We can’t do that with the databases used to “officially” document whether L. japonicum is invasive. But by building a body of well reviewed information, we can make it possible to show that those databases should be questioned.

You don’t have to be an expert in botany to do this. You just have to focus on a genus or species or two that you find interesting, learn as much as you can about it, and review observations identified as that taxon.

I enrolled in only one botany class in college, and I dropped it in the first week. (A 7:30 a.m. lab and a job that went until 10 p.m. the night before that lab had something to do with that decision.) I got interested in Ligustrum species because several of them are damaging habitat in a park I care deeply about, and the first step to attacking them was to learn my enemy. From learning enough to tell which ligustrums were in that park and which weren’t, I got to be good enough at identifying them to start helping others fix their mistakes.

Anyone can do that, actually. And a good place to start is with an observation you have a lot of questions about. Learn more about the species involved. If you can learn how to tell them apart, put that knowledge to use by reviewing other observations. You might discover that you can help a few of those experts fill in a gap in their knowledge.

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I already do this for Italian observations of plants. But let’s do not forget that the involvement in iNat for many of us is just volunteering while we already have to fulfil the commitments with our jobs, our families, etc.
So, the problem remains and is related to the possibility of a certain number of users making a large number of wrong identifications. This is something that goes along with the issue of users posting a large number of non-wild organisms. If they are many, it can turn out to be very time-consuming to fix and hardly to be done by few willing users.

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I absolutely benefit from your ID efforts. I say keep up the good work!

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