Remove Multiple Person Accounts From Leaderboard

[BJ Stacey]

Having accounts where multiple people use the same account should make that account void from being able to be on any leaderboard.  Having these accounts on the leaderboard take away from those users who work hard to appear there (and removes at least one person who belongs).

I know of a few accounts where this is the case.  Please consider this request.

BJ Stacey

Follow my outings on iNaturalist.org
http://www.inaturalist.org/people/finatic

[Paul]

I would agree with this. When I started on here 2 years ago I was put forward to me 

That observations should be from individuals 

Only if we are now allowing groups then 

There should be a separate tally for multiple 

People posting on one account 

Sent from my iPhone

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[Paul Kelly]

The silence on this is definitely annoying

ck2az
Paul Kelly

[Scott Loarie]

Is this just a questagame thing? Because if so they told us they're working towards letting questagame users authenticate individually through iNat rather than go through a group account which is what we're waiting for.

we also are hesitant to do anything to encourage group accounts which special functionality to accomodate them may do

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--------------------------------------------------
Scott R. Loarie, Ph.D.
Co-director, iNaturalist.org
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Dr
San Francisco, CA 94118
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[Paul]

Thank you for the reply 

My concern is I’ve recruited around 3 dozen people on here over the year or so 

Plus I’m getting ready to set up a project for my daughters 1st grade class, it makes me look bad when I’m telling people that they should only post what they see 

And then boom.. and then they see multiple people on here posting on single accounts.

Also 

I brought this up before with others concerning if I could get help posting observations that I did but ran out of time to post that month and was told no I could not 

That I had to post them myself 

I’m trying to get clarification on this because 

I’m confused 

Sent from my iPhone

[Scott Loarie]

Hi Paul,

Definitely another gray area. The FAQ states: 

'Please do not upload photos taken by other people, since they don't represent your own experiences and probably represent a violation of copyright law. Instead, please encourage them to post their photos to their own iNaturalist account.'

But aside from the copyright issues which are more serious, this isn't a super hard rule because:

1) Occasionally posting photos made by others (with permission) for personal reasons is fine. I posted this photo from a friend from a trip 20 years ago before I had my own camera https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/15556

2) This isn't something that is policed, and our preference would be effort goes into observing and identifying rather than spending too much time policing this. 

3) Remember there's over 1,000,000 accounts on iNaturalist but more than half have never posted an observation. A significant portion are probably latent bot accounts (which we can squash once they start posting content and we recognize them as such). I don't think anybody is aware or really cares about the status of 'little' accounts, many of which may be group - who knows?

4) But there are a few 'big' group accounts. The two I'm aware of are natureinla and questagame.

natureinla is run by the LA Natural History Museum. They have been a hugely important collaborative institution for iNaturalist. They've been very successful at helping iNat thrive and do a ton of outreach, training, and cool activities (they even got Mayor Eric Garcetti to stump for iNat! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1fjIvdkZ4M) . One small part of this overall portfolio is that when people email them photos they post them to the natureinla group account. Because this group account is part of a larger outreach and engagement strategy, its not something we're too worked up about.

questagame is a bit different. Originally their app were creating individual accounts which we thought we're 'real users' like the accounts http://tatzpiteva.org.il/ by having users of their app authenticate through iNat. Then we realized that the accounts questagame was making looked like individual accounts but were actually controlled entirely by questagame with no direct channel for the iNat community to communicate with whoever they were supposed to be representing. e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/people/grisper. There were some security concerns with this approach in addition to general weirdness so we asked them to switch to a group account  while they work to make their app authenticate properly through iNat. Our understanding is that they are actively working towards this, but it may be time for a check in.

---

I guess our feeling on the staff side has been that group accounts have represented a small edgewise which hasn't to this point drawn a lot of concern. We'd prefer they continue to be a small edge case and to continue to ignore them. Its getting harder to ignore questagame which is now No. 17 on the leaderboard https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&subview=grid&view=observers but my personal hope was that they'd switch over to properly authenticating individual accounts before they climb too much higher. We're hesitant to formally 'endorse' group accounts which building special functionality for would include because the negative impacts on the community of an increase in group accounts is unknown. 

But if people really think group accounts are becoming a problem, my questions are:

1) is this just a questagame problem or a larger problem? - if its just a questagame problem we can try to get more on top of whats going on there

2) if people think giving natureinla a free pass is unfair do we we need to have them make a more formal argument for what there outreach activities are, why the work they're doing is awesome, and how the natureinla account plays into this strategy? Is this a good/high priority use of 'governance resources'

3) should we start trying to 'police' group accounts. Is this a good/high priority use of 'governance resources'

4) should we stop trying to discourage group accounts which would include taking steps that may seen as an endorsement such as functionality that recognizes them and tries to accomodate them. As always, what are the risks of this change and is it a priority?

[Charlie Hohn]

i don't personally thing any effort should be made to remove group accounts, as long as the data is being posted with permission they can be an important part of getting biodiversity data available to a bunch of people. It seems like only two or three of them are big enough to cause any form of issue, why not just deal with those directly instead of building unneeded functionality? Though i don't see what the big deal is, 'group accounts' are a part of ecology and nature observation, under the realm of data compilers, herbariums, etc, and i don't think they should be discouraged at all if they are getting real data out there.  Just my opinion of course but given all the issues we have to spend limited time on harassing people for respectfully posting biodiversity information seems like a poor one to spend time on

============================
Charlie Hohn
Montpelier, Vermont

[Paul]

Thank You. Loarie and Charlie

For the reply to my comment on here 

I’m trying not to put out bad info 

To people concerning posting observations 

On here,  and it answers questions I have had concerning getting caught on my observations backlog 

I’ll bow out now and let BJ 

Ask his question 

Sincerely 

ck2az

Paul Kelly 

Sent from my iPhone

[Chris Cheatle]

Scott, It would be really helpful if this '1) Occasionally posting photos made by others (with permission) for personal reasons is fine.' and this from the help page 'Please do not upload photos taken by other people, since they don't represent your own experiences and probably represent a violation of copyright law. Instead, please encourage them to post their photos to their own iNaturalist account.' https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#observations8

Could somehow be merged into a more complete / consistent statement regarding acceptability of this practice.

[Riviera S]

I think there is potential for this to keep happening in future, for one reason or another. Is there some way to flag an account, similar to how accounts can be flagged as spam, but in this case so they just don't show on the leaderboards? There are lots of filter options for sightings, maybe there can be a filter done for accounts too.

[Riviera S]

There are actually a lot of group accounts, mostly small, scattered around. One example of a small group account is https://www.inaturalist.org/people/naturespotter

I'll see if I can remember some others, if they are pertinent to the discussion.

[BJ Stacey]

There are other accounts.  Those accounts can appear on lower level leaderboards like state or county.  I do think that there are cases where these multiple person accounts are bypassing the minimum age requirement of iNat, but that is another story. I'm not wanting to personally call out any accounts (I can message you separately Scot if you wish) but they are frustrating on multiple levels.  

BJ 

On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 5:17 PM Riviera S <riviera...@gmail.com> wrote:

There are actually a lot of group accounts, mostly small, scattered around. One example of a small group account is https://www.inaturalist.org/people/naturespotter

I'll see if I can remember some others, if they are pertinent to the discussion.

--

[Charlie Hohn]

there are so many reasons you might want to post someone elses data that is not against the spirit of iNat at all:

-a conservation or science group has a bunch of data (often with photos) taken by various employees, they are fine with it being used/the data is public, but it just sits on your computer Why not put it on Nat so others can use it?

-Digitizing a herbarium. Tons of people do this. It's absurd to try to make a separate account for each person. But doing so is super valuable. No it doesn't replace the value of the actual samples but look at that recent fire in Brazil? Sometimes samples are lost and anyhow that way everyone can see them. I've got a smal herbarium that might get moved to a storage place with a flood plain (not my choice). I need to digitize it. Why not iNat? 

-Students in a class for a lot of reasons.

-A town doing an inventory with one account for say, invasive species, ash trees vulnerable to ash borer, etc.

-Things like natureinLA which are totally fine (though the account hasn't been great with spatial accuracy, but it isn't a big deal). 

A person/group doing a joint account needs to have at least the same commitment to curating and watching the data as a regular user. No 'dump and dash data'. But regular users leave too.  I don't want to post this stuff on my own account because it messes up my life list. And if i did that would be way more 'cheating' than having a joint account if i did. I don't get this odd idea that excluding them from the leaderboard will encourage more people to make them. Isn't that the opposite?  People will continue to make them unless some awful draconian effort to verify individuals occurs on the site (and if that happens, prepare to lose a LOT of users). Pretending they don't exist creates problems and causes no solutions. 

[tcw...@gmail.com]

I agree with Scott and Charlie - There are many reasons to have "group" or "organization" accounts. In particular, local conservation groups who try to maintain complete records of observations but have contributors who are not on iNat. Actually, my first reaction to this discussion was "Why would anyone care about leaderboards? Natural history is not a competitive sport." But then I remembered the long history of academic chest-thumping and paleontology shenanigans, and realized I was wrong about that. But still, I'd hope that people don't contribute to iNat solely for their personal glory.

[Tait Sougstad]

I'd say that the "group" issue is a subset of the "leaderboard" issue. The conversations I've seen have generally winked at the idea of people getting worked up about the leaderboards, but we're all mature adults, right? In doing this, we are letting rust one of the most motivational tools we have! I don't think iNat needs to go full gamification, but let's not pretend that the leaderboard is not a key part of our mission, because motivating observations and retaining users is central to our mission. The group issue should be a part of some serious consideration on how to create motivational hooks in the platform.

A quick fix would be to create a "group account" setting that just removes them from the leaderboard, or puts them in a different one. I think we want to have groups for the reasons stated by Charlie. I think that we want to encourage group accounts so that we start seeing users like @yellowstonenps @custerusfs @msubozemanentymology @cornelllab etc. etc. If groups can see iNat as a tool to fulfill their own mission and facilitate outreach and interaction for them, they will become natural hubs of activity and outreach for us. I'd encourage you guys to consider it more carefully.

iNat would benefit greatly from both group user policies and accommodation, and greater use of the leaderboards.

Tait

[Jay Keller]

I completely agree with scrubbing group accounts from the leaderboard. Having them defeats the purpose of a leaderboard in the first place. Would it be fair to compare one quarterback's pass record to the entire league of quarterbacks? I am frankly shocked that anyone would disagree with this and not see this as being an obvious issue for those hard-working individuals who are, in fact, contributing massive amounts of content. Those contributors should be respected for what they do, but watering down the leaderboard is the opposite message.

Jay Keller

[Charlie Hohn]

i think the best answer here is to make a check box people can choose to get their account excluded from the leaderboards. And, anyone who wants to do a joint account, since it's slightly different from a normal account, needs to check the box. Others may want to for other reasons too. i'm sure questagame and natureinLA etc would be OK with checking the box.

On Sun, Dec 2, 2018 at 12:49 AM Jay Keller <azure....@gmail.com> wrote:

I completely agree with scrubbing group accounts from the leaderboard.  Having them defeats the purpose of a leaderboard in the first place.  Would it be fair to compare one quarterback's pass record to the entire league of quarterbacks?  I am frankly shocked that anyone would disagree with this and not see this as being an obvious issue for those hard-working individuals who are, in fact, contributing massive amounts of content.  Those contributors should be respected for what they do, but watering down the leaderboard is the opposite message.

Jay Keller

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[Jay Keller]

Sorry Charlie, I can't disagree more.  Comparing apples to oranges should not be an option.  I haven't really been on any leaderboard for about two years, but I am thinking of those who are.  I understand the effort involved that places them there.

The separate group list is an ok option, but the sightings there should probably be displayed as obs/species per group user.

Jay

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[Charlie Hohn]

I think maybe you are misunderstanding or i miscommunicated... i am saying that they group accounts should be responsible for excluding themselves from the leaderboard via a built in option.

[megatherium]

Jay, you're on the leaderboard for most species observed in 2018 (if we exclude questagame). I know because I'm trying to take your spot. ;)

[Jay Keller]

I am pretty sure I understood you.  What if they don't exclude themselves?  Then they will still show and then we are still with the current problem.

[Jay Keller]

Really?  I haven't looked in a long while, assuming I was way down the list.

[Paul]

Why would it or is it that hard to have two 

Leaderboards one for individuals and the other for groups, as INat has grown 

It obvious this was going to become a issue 

Also it is a motivational to have the leaderboards especially to new comers 

And would motivate group accounts from schools and other big groups...

We sold our Tucson house to a software engineer who is also on here I could talk to him if help is needed to do a layout  

He said he owned me one LOl...

Also since we have gone international 

Beak it down by continents to 

Again INat is growing with more people 

It maybe time to makes some tweaks 

Sent from my iPhone

[Paul]

It also my have a silver lining 

Since most of our bad observations 

Seem to come from school accounts 

It would make it easier for groups 

Wanting to filter out bad observations 

Sent from my iPhone

[Charlie Hohn]

I’m just trying to get around Scott’s Desire not to make special group accounts. (Which I don’t agree with fwiw)

Sent from Gmail Mobile

[Riviera S]

Jay, I don't think anyone disagrees with you, but I think people have different opinions of how much significance/importance the leaderboard has. So naturally, people who don't care about "rankings", are less biased towards fixing it. I suspect there are plenty of great contributors who value their contributions without a leaderboard. Not sure though. I'm just speculating for the sake of discussion...

[Jay Keller]

I disagree.  People have disagreed.

Bottom line to me is, if you have a leaderboard it should be measured via a standard.  If not, then just get rid of it.

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[Mark Tutty]

Jay,

 

It IS measured by a standard: “Observations by an account”. And I think you are confused when you say “Would it be fair to compare one quarterback's pass record to the entire league of quarterbacks?”, because that IS fair! And does happen, I am sure! A better analogy there would be comparing quarterbacks to linebackers, or even better still, comparing a single players tackle count (is that a thing? I’m NZ) to the tackle count of whole teams.

 

I think group accounts should be filtered out of main leaderboards. Collection projects are a good way to provide competitive comparison between groups should it be desired. A group implies organisation, so setting up such projects would likely not be a problem. Create a project for each team (and include obs from individual members) and then an umbrella project encompassing the teams provides the scoring.

 

I think there still needs to be group accounts. We do work with schools and have the WarOnWeeds account to work with the students. It allows us to supervise and manage the observations of the children, and tidy up any problems that occur, and it works with no detrimental impact on iNaturalist and the Identifying community, at least as far as I am aware. Out of those programs, one or two children will go on to become very active and valued members of the iNat community, and we even get the occasional parent helper that becomes an active participant too! But WarOnWeeds shouldn’t appear in any Leaderboard, and by the very nature of being an organised group thing, I think the creator of the account would happily set the group account flag so that it doesn’t.

 

As far as “What if they don’t set it?”... the larger the group, the more likely the person managing the group account will be tech savvy and a passionate naturalist, so you will find that the ones that don’t set the flag were never likely to affect the leaderboards anyway! If you think about the group accounts that have raised this issue, the organisations behind those would be only to happy and willing to set such a flag.

 

cheers
Mark Tutty
kiwif...@gmail.com

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