[Taxacom] iNaturalist and the dangers of community ID sites!

[Ivie, Michael]

Victim?  Really? This is. What you think qualifies you for victim hood?


__________________________________________________
Michael A. Ivie, Ph.D., F.R.E.S.

NOTE: two addresses with different Zip Codes depending on carriers

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Montana Entomology Collection
Marsh Labs, Room 50
PO Box 173145
Montana State University
Bozeman, MT 59717
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mivie at montana.edu


________________________________
From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> on behalf of Stephen Thorpe via Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2021 4:35 PM
To: Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Subject: [Taxacom] iNaturalist and the dangers of community ID sites!

Hi All,
I find myself the victim of something of an attack on iNaturalist, the upshot being that I am currently suspended (removing all my 50000+ observations from public view!) I'm moderately hopeful of being reinstated, possibly no longer with curator status. People at this end are working on it, but it seems to be serious. I would therefore like to put on public record exactly what happened, as a cautionary tale of the dangers of community ID sites like iNaturalist. When it goes wrong, it can go very wrong, very quickly!
So, without a word to me, Danilo Hegg rolled back all my IDs of the cockroach Balta bicolor, publicly commenting that I had made a big mistake and that they were all some unknown species of Ellipsidion. He was congratulated by another user for uncovering my "big mistake"! This poses an immediate problem because the 50 or so affected observations are now no longer straightforwardly searchable as Balta bicolor and the distribution of the species can no longer be straightforwardly mapped, etc.
In principle, community ID can outweigh Hegg to restore the Balta bicolor ID, but in reality there is pretty much nobody on iNat familiar enough with the group to make a meaningful judgement. That is a problem.
Anyway, when I noticed all this and challenged Hegg, he wouldn't budge. It turns out that his judgement was initially based on the fact the observations didn't match the exemplar photos for the species on iNat. However, there are few quality controls on exemplar photos on iNat, especially for relatively "obscure" species like Balta bicolor. Some unknown person had recently changed the exemplar photos for Balta bicolor on iNat to another species, clearly misidentified! I then corrected those exemplar photos, but they could change again at any time, without much control.
The other reason why Hegg thought that I was wrong is that Balta bicolor closely resembles, superficially at least, some species currently included in the genus Ellipsidion. OK, so what? Maybe it is a result of convergent evolution? Maybe Balta bicolor is currently misplaced in Balta and should in future be transferred by taxonomists to the genus Ellipsidion? Maybe Ellipsidion is really just a specialised species group nested within Balta? We just don't know.
Anyway, I then informed Hegg of a fact he appears to have overlooked, that my ID of Balta bicolor was based on a validated new to N.Z. report by our official government biosecurity authority (MPI). Hegg responded by claiming that MPI must have got it wrong!
Now, here's the killer: only at this late stage did Hegg think that maybe he should consult the original description (the only recent taxonomic treatment) for Balta bicolor! I noticed him request a copy from someone on iNat, so I provided Hegg with a copy. It was immediately clear from the description that the former exemplar photos were indeed misidentified. So far so good. However, although the description matches the N.Z. species as well as one can reasonably expect for a written description from 1943, and based on limited material from the native range in Australia, Hegg still maintained that I was wrong and he was right. He did what I can only describe as fixating on minor interpretative ambiguities in the description to try to maintain his seemingly fixed in concrete view on the matter. He misquoted the description as saying that the tegmina were conspicuously bicoloured, when in fact it said that the limbs [legs] were conspicuously bicoloured and that the tegmina were "usually bicolored". Again, all attempts by me to explain this to him were immediately dismissed by him.
>From my point of view, about 50 observations had already been damaged by Hegg's actions and I didn't know what might be next on his "hit list". I therefore considered him to represent an immediate threat to iNat, requiring immediate action. So, as a purely temporary measure I suspended him just until such time as I could raise awareness of the issue and get meaningful discussion/consensus. I immediately emailed iNat help desk, asking for urgent advice, but I still haven't had any reply.
Someone unknown to me on iNat kept on unsuspending Hegg, without contacting me to ask why I had suspended him, or asking me to unsuspend him. As far as I knew, it could have just been a friend of Hegg, covertly trying to unsuspend him. I therefore kept reapplying the suspension, pending some sort of discussion. OK, I got a bit frustrated and made some comments that were very mildly inappropriate, and tried to solve the problem in ways which were arguably technically against the rules, but I felt taht I had to act quickly to try to avoid further damage to iNat observations, always seeking advice and discussion which wasn't forthcoming quickly enough. The upshot is that I'm now suspended and the admins the N.Z. node now need to negotiate with head office in California in order to lift my suspension. Only if and when that is successful will my observations return to public view.
I'd be interested in any comments on all this.

Sincerely, Stephen
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