What's the appropriate way to get a place boundary updated?

General
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Ref: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=121212

This place outline, Deer Lakes Park PA seems to have been delineated a bit hastily, putting it politely. The actual park boundaries are correctly shaded in green on the map layer and can be corroborated by the county provided map:
https://www.alleghenycounty.us/uploadedFiles/Allegheny_Home/Dept-Content/Parks/resources/maps/map-deer-lakes-blazed.pdf

and google maps:
https://g.page/deer-lakes-park?share

Since I didn’t create the place and am not a curator I don’t think there’s anything I can do to update this personally but I’m hoping there’s some kind of support workflow to request it be done?

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The name is also misspelled. I’d be OK fixing things, but it would be good to reach out to the creator and ask them if it’s OK (or if they wanted to fix it). It doesn’t look like you can flag places, which is what I would think would be the best route of action.
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/deer-lake-park-pa

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Looks like the creator was last active about 9 months ago, so probably best to PM them (on the chance that they have messages going to email). But if you don’t hear anything back after a while, I think it’s fair to edit as this is pretty obviously incorrect. It’s also worth noting that it looks like all the observations currently in the place would continue to be in there if edited to be correct, so this wouldn’t exclude any observations if they were using the place for a project or something.

Tangent: Google Maps often has incorrect place boundaries so not necessarily a good source for making places: the county map sounds pretty definitive!

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@thomaseverest @cthawley Thanks both of you, I’ll message the creator and respond here if I do/don’t hear anything back.

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If you don’t hear back, it might just be easier to create a new place with a more accurate boundary. You don’t need “PA” in the place name since the place should have PA as a parent (which the current place does not).

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Something like that is needed, yes, but unlike taxa, places are not managed by curators, so flagging a place would be like so many trees falling in the woods :-)

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Oh yeah, easier certainly-- although there is a big warning on the create places UI about how they slow down the site, so I tried this approach first

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Haven’t had any response to a message. @thomaseverest do you mind taking care of it when you have time?

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Done!

https://www.inaturalist.org/places/deer-lakes-park

Because of the new restrictions on places, it wasn’t as simple as changing the polygon. I created the KML file on Google My Maps because I could trace the Google boundary, but then iNat didn’t recognize the file. Using the tips here, I downloaded the existing KML file, opened both KML files in TextEdit, and pasted the coordinates (without altitude) from my new KML into the old one. Then it uploaded fine.

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Thank you! I didn’t realize part of the new approach to Places was removing the polygon tool, but as the discussion notes…it wasn’t super easy to draw complex places at all (at least last time I used it)

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Places can be managed by curators (as happened here). See this feature request:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/flag-a-place-for-curation/7474

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just for future reference, since the place exists in OSM, you could probably just extract/export those OSM boundaries (if the park’s administrators don’t offer a more authoritative source for boundaries).

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Cool thanks, good to know. Although it’s slightly different from the park map, so still helpful to have the drawing.

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