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

Sat Dec 18 18:38:48 CST 2021

This is really shocking!
I believe that such suspension should not affect your contribution. Of
course, we all should try to be kind, but it is really difficult to see how
some amateurs or nonspecialists 'correct' your contribution. This is a dark
side of social science when it does not matter how right you are, but how
kindly you behave and fit the social frames. As a result, science loses -
but who cares. For many people, such social platforms like iNat are some
kind of entertainment, and they treat science in an unserious way so. This
is what always scared me from iNat and other similar platforms.
I am really sorry to hear this, Stephen. You are totally right. But I do
not know what to do. Probably the best way is to propose to iNat that they
will unlock your observations and you will not contribute to iNat never
after. If they want to play in their sandbox, so go on.

Sincerely, Andriy.

нд, 19 груд. 2021 р. о 01:36 Stephen Thorpe via Taxacom <
taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> пише:

> 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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-- 
_________________________________________

Research Scientist, Dr.  Andriy Novikov

State Museum of Natural History
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

Teatralna str. 18
79008 Lviv
Ukraine

Researcher ID: K-4997-2013 <https://publons.com/researcher/K-4997-2013/>
ORCID: 0000-0002-0112-5070 <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0112-5070>

_________________________________________