really why does iNat put two powers that need separate qualities kept as one tag? why put two unrelated tool in one person’s hand who may not use one or even in cases misuse it? just asking.
There is an open request to split taxonomy queries from social media moderation.
I suspect it is more about the tremendous workload and the scarcity of those both willing and with the time to volunteer and capable of professionalism.
They may neither need nor want both sets of tools but I suspect they are given both and guidance for both in the event they might need them, in the hopes they will utilize them.
Probably just the same tendency toward conflation that still puts absurdly different categories such as cultivated plants, records missing information, accidental photo grouping, and outright data fraud under the lumpen header of ‘Casual Grade’.
A comment in another thread suggested there may be a staff position being created in these areas.
I think it’s a case where people know where they stand when they get curator status. If you’re a gastropod expert who gets curator status because you want to curate snail taxonomy, sure you could go and moderate comment threads if you wanted to… but you probably won’t. It’s easier to have one setting for “curator” that covers everything and trust people to know their position than to have multiple settings options for all the different iterations that could occur.
I suspect the reason is mostly something like “this is how the iNat curator role was created when iNat was quite small”. When iNat was smaller, there weren’t as many curators, content moderation was a smaller part of a curator’s “job” (there was a lot of basic taxonomic curation at the beginning, fewer users, and users were early adopters who cared a lot/were less likely to be students/CNC participants, etc. whose content generally needs more moderation), and it wasn’t really necessary to split the roles/powers.
I agree that it makes sense to do so now, but this is one among many competing priorities for improving iNat, and I can understand why it hasn’t been at the top of the list for implementation (NB: I did vote for the feature request linked above, but it wouldn’t be one of my top five or probably even 10 requests to implement right away if I had a magic wand to do so). Since iNat is now hiring a dedicated role for Community Moderation, that indicates that iNat (as an org) is making community moderation and curation more of a priority. The existence of someone worked dedicatedly on this will presumably lead to much bigger improvements in the general realm going forwards. So it probably makes sense to give that role time to get on board and in action and see how things proceed. I am hopeful!
Why?
The OP in the discussion you linked to (from 2019) talks about curators who were not doing any curating for a long time. The OP in this thread is only concerned about the potential of curators with two categories of power to abuse that power. But as others have replied, curators, by and large, stick to their roles.
If there are any actual complaints about abuse of power by individual curators, why can’t they be flagged and addressed, one at a time?
? Why is in that thread. The initial request by bouteloa. And 2 of her requests were activated in January 2021. Then got stuck at the third step.
I would argue that if you can’t be trusted to do only the part of the work that you’re qualified to do, you should not have either set of powers. The fact that curators by and large stick to their areas of expertise indicates that they are trustworthy.
Of course, the part of me that understands something about human nature also argues that anyone can slip up, and you can’t accidentally (or intentionally) abuse powers you don’t have, so splitting up the roles would to some extent protect everyone, including curators themselves.
Practically, of course, the reason presumably is: Because they only created one special user role. At the time they created it, perhaps neither job seemed big enough to be worth separating them. Splitting them would require work, and there’s so many other things to do.