iNaturalist is not a data aggregator. that’s the function of ALA and GBIF.
nobody has ever said that by joining iNaturalist, you can’t also join Questagame, if you like.
questagame obviously will never give anyone here a straight answer about why it cares so much about pushing its data into iNaturalist. so i’m going to fill in the gaps.
the real reason questagame is interested in linking to iNaturalist is because the QG identifier community is not as strong as the iNat identifier community. plain and simple. one of the really neat things about iNaturalist is that you can post an observation, and an expert from half a world away will make an ID. most people who have used iNat will have experienced this small sense of awe at some point. when questagame says that “these experts should be sharing knowledge”, what they really mean is that they want access to the power of the iNat identifier community.
isn’t one of the unique points of QG that they pay people to identify? if you look at the fine print, questagame actually allow people identifying on their platform to nominate an organization to which questagame is supposed to make a distribution at some point. do those other organizations actually ever get a check? who knows?
and where does the money to “pay” for identification effort come from? the app is free to download and use, but QG may charge you to start a “clan” or to start a “bioquest”. in iNaturalist, you will never be charged to start a project or bioblitz. iNaturalist is interested in creating a community. questagame’s desire to build a community is mixed in with its revenue model. that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but just think about that next time questagame talks vaguely about some sort of fancy ideal like freeing certain groups of people from the shackles of the western science establishment.
so let’s put this all together. if you’re a questgame user paying $X a year, but none of your observations are getting identified very quickly, would you be happy? if there’s another platform that you could use for free and which offers access to a larger community and where your observations are more likely to be identified, would you be tempted to drop questagame altogether?
does questagame really offer anything unique that really supports BIPOC?
once again, we’re talking about what’s good for QG, and not what’s actually good for BIPOC. so time to get back to the original topic.