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

[Stephen Thorpe]

 Thanks Andriy for a more thoughtful and scholarly reply than the previous one! Realistically, I'm probably going to have to surrender my curator status on iNat, but I should be able to continue to contribute, after my suspension gets lifted, but things aren't looking overly optimistic just at present. As you say, people prioritise the social aspects over the science, and don't seem to care so much that Hegg's approach to the identification of this species was so utterly flawed. Even his etiquette was seriously flawed, rolling back my IDs with no prior discussion, and without first "doing his homework", at least in my opinion, however, blaming the victim seems to be all the rage on social media platforms, particularly in cases like this when it is one against several (i.e. all my old foes on iNat coming out of the woodwork to back up Hegg!) Just like what Mike just did to me here on Taxacom [sorry Mike, but just saying!] I guess I don't need to explain the influence of bully politics to someone from the Ukraine, which seems to be vulnerable to similar forces but on a much bigger and more serious scale. All the best, my new friend.Cheers, Stephen
    On Sunday, 19 December 2021, 01:39:33 pm NZDT, Andriy Novikov <novikoffav at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 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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-- 
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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
 ORCID: 0000-0002-0112-5070


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