Dealing with too many non-wild observations

[cray man]

What stance does inaturalist currently have on how to deal with non-wild observations?  Is it ok to politely add a comment suggesting to the observer to limit such observations?  It would be nice if there is a standard writeup we could link to describing in detail why we prefer they not add these sorts of observations.  It seems there are more observers doing captive observations than wild ones these days.  It's driving me crazy.  It sure wastes a lot of my time.

Perhaps it would be a good use of the artificial intelligence to learn how to detect captive observations and do something about them.

[Chris Cheatle]

There is a boilerplate you can use here : https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses#notwild

A lot of it still comes down to classes, last week here in Canada it was Dalhousie University and their botanical garden, this week it is Trent University and every planted tree on campus.

[bouteloua]

One method of detection for captive observations is the following:

• The system will vote that the observation is not wild/naturalized if there are at least 10 other observations of a genus or lower in the smallest county-, state-, or country-equivalent place that contains this observation and 80% or more of those observations have been marked as not wild/naturalized."

On this observation you can see that iNaturalist.org has marked thumbs down to "Organism is wild."

cassi

[bouteloua]

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/15275750 !

[Kent McFarland]

Similarly, we have a project that has a rule that is it must be wild. Yet, when we mark something as not wild it doesn't seem to disappear from our project. Does anyone know how this rule is working? Is it only when the user marks it as not wild? We spend a LOT of time removing dogs, cats, people, flower gardens, etc. from our project. 

Thanks

Kent

On Thursday, October 4, 2018 at 8:01:01 AM UTC-4, cray man wrote:

[Tony Iwane]

Kent can you please share the URL of your project? Specific details are always helpful when trying to diagnose problems.

Tony Iwane

[Kent McFarland]

OH for sure. Sorry about that. The project is the Vermont Atlas of Life

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/vermont-atlas-of-life

We just cleaned a ton of them up so we could be more sure we hit a quarter million obs recently, but here's an example of one

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/17166451

____________________________

Kent McFarland
Vermont Center for Ecostudies
PO Box 420 | Norwich, Vermont 05055
802.649.1431 x201
@KPMcFarland
Visit the Vermont Atlas of Life

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 12:18 PM Tony Iwane <tiw...@gmail.com> wrote:

Kent can you please share the URL of your project? Specific details are always helpful when trying to diagnose problems.

Tony Iwane

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[Chris Cheatle]

Kent,

Is this a project that still has the aggregator automatically collecting records and adding them to the project ?

If so, I think what happens is if a record is added which initially qualifies for the project, and is subsequently edited to make it ineligible (such as marking it cultivated), there is no process to go in and get it out of projects.

You see this happen in other projects where kids add joke ID's, the record goes into an aggregator project, people clean up the false ID, but the record stays in the project..

On Thursday, October 4, 2018 at 8:01:01 AM UTC-4, cray man wrote:

[Tait Sougstad]

For one of the many extensive, contentious, and somewhat circular threads related to this, you may want to review this. It has pretty good representation of a number of perspectives.

Tait

[Tony Iwane]

Hi Kent,

Chris is correct in that your project is a Traditional project and not a Collection project (see explanations of projects here) so observations are not automatically removed from them. 

One thing you can do, which might make this slightly more efficient, is to click on "Find unsuitable observations" on the project page. This will perform a search that returns all observations in the project that no longer fit the project's rules. You can then click on the observations and remove them one by one.

Tony Iwane

[Kent McFarland]

Thanks Chris. That is it. Thanks for the explanation.

Kent

____________________________

Kent McFarland
Vermont Center for Ecostudies
PO Box 420 | Norwich, Vermont 05055
802.649.1431 x201
@KPMcFarland
Visit the Vermont Atlas of Life

--

[jdmore]

"You can then click on the observations and remove them one by one."

Sounds like something ripe for some batch functionality?

--Jim Morefield