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

Wed Dec 22 15:29:21 CST 2021

 Thanks Scott, for your very detailed thoughts on the issue. I would like to, if I may, comment on a few points: 
(1) 'sockpuppetry (use of multiple accounts to cause harm)'There is an issue here. Sockpuppetry is actually just the use of multiple accounts. That alone seems to be sufficient grounds to suspend/block users, on some sites, whether or not the socks are actually causing any "harm" (which requires objective definition). I had multiple accounts on iNat for certain valid purposes, and staff at the N.Z. node of iNat have been aware of this for some years now. It wasn't a problem. 
(2) 'There should be no way for people to use their influence to impact the data presented to the public'True, but there should equally be no way for people to use their influence to get other people suspended and kicked off the site! We are all agreed here at iNat in N.Z. that Charlie Hohn and others have been sitting in wait for me to make some sort of mistake. His possible influence on iNat staff in California is difficult to determine. Danilo Hegg's actions have certainly had a negative impact on the data presented to the public (for at least one species, Balta bicolor), but he appears to be able to continue with impunity, allowing him to cover up the evidence if he does step out of line. 
(3) I largely agree with your final paragraph. The problem is that, because of Charlie Hohn's influence(?), I was already facing a 1 year suspension, and now, for trying to defend myself against that by highlighting issues here on taxacom, I'm told that I'm likely now facing a lifetime suspension! You said yourself, that even on Wikimedia, a 24 hr suspension for a profanity would be a proportional response, and I fully agree with that. However, since Saturday, I have only had one day without suspension. My first suspension hid all my years of contributions from public view. That isn't the case now, thank goodness, but I'm still suspended. My suspension is a result of trying to protect iNat from a destructive approach to IDs by Danilo Hegg. I suspended him, but only as a desperate temporary measure to stop him in his tracks. However, Hohn has thrown me naked into the spotlight, while Hegg faces little or no consequences for his actions, and if he does step over the line, like yesterday, the evidence is removed! 
Is it just me, or is something not quite right here??
Sincerely, Stephen 
    On Thursday, 23 December 2021, 09:36:48 am NZDT, Scott Thomson <scott.thomson321 at gmail.com> wrote:  

 Just a couple of observations here.
I also agree with what Doug has said and wanted to add some observations. 

For myself I am involved with Wikimedia Foundation, as an Ombud, CheckUser, and Beaurocrat. Of course I am also a contributor. Now from this one thing that can happen is overlap of responsibilities, and this happens in the absence of clear policies of direction.
As a contributor to Wikimedia, across about 12 different wikis, I limit myself to my field of specialty. Basically I discuss reptile taxonomy for the most part. I have a duty in my job there to be careful about my conflicts of interests.
For my other official duties I have to recuse myself if it is concerning any of the pages I am involved in editing. As an ombud I must recuse myself if it involves Wikispecies at all. No matter what the page is on. To explain the roles very briefly, Ombud is like (to use an analogy) internal affairs of a police force, I am responsible for investigating breaches of privacy and abuse of power by CheckUsers and Oversighters. CheckUsers look for sockpuppetry (use of multiple accounts to cause harm) and Oversighters make objectionable information invisible, i.e. wipe the history of pages. Bureaucrats are admins and are in charge of the administrators of a particular wiki. This is a simplified version. The point is all this must be supported by policies and guidelines that those with administrative (curatorial) powers must follow. This is important and would seem to be absent in iNat.
Dealing with people and dealing with the information on the pages are two different things. They must be separate. Just because someone has said things in the wrong way does not mean the information they were discussing was incorrect. Stephans abusive posts based on what he described would have landed him in hot water on any community page on any platform, for which he would be warned or whatever, but this does not mean that everything he has written about should be deleted. In other words deal with the swearing, the identifications are irrelevant to that and are another issue. Does iNat not have some sort of arbitration process? Seriously lack of internal policy is stupid for any platform that has public exposure. If these people are using their capacity to directly influence the inner circle of the owners that is a conflict of interests and should be investigated. As an ombud I have had cases like this where it is clear CheckUsers were protecting each other, those people are not CheckUsers anymore. There should be no way for people to use their influence to impact the data presented to the public.
What it seems to me is that iNat needs to get their internal administration processes in order, and find that clear separation of adjudicating the problems of people and the problems of data. For myself my only involvement in iNat is to identify pictures of species I know, I have no interest in curating there. I have enough of that type of work on Wikimedia and it can be a very long drawn out process dealing with people.  However, I think iNat is very useful, though I accept the caveat that identifications there should be taken with a grain of salt. If I do not know who identified a turtle to species I cannot trust the id. Most of the photos are not sufficiently detailed enough for a photo id to species, for turtles.
Stephen, I have known you for a long time. I know you can lose your temper. The problem in social media is you always have to assume you are speaking to a kindergarten class with their parents watching. In America that is a big deal, and the monent you drop the f-bomb you lose the debate. Most Americans would not care if you are in New Zealand, they think the internet belongs to them and everyone follows their rules. Reality has little to do with it, look at their politics. You would have been blocked on Wikimedia for saying that too, for 24 hours. But we would not have deleted your data just because you swore at someone because that should be a separate issue and this is what iNat is doing wrong in my mind. They should have independently arbitrated the situation but are clearly not set up to do so.
Cheers Scott

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 2:41 AM Stephen Thorpe via Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:

 So, now we see what has happened on Subfamily Pseudophyllodromiinae

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Subfamily Pseudophyllodromiinae

Pseudophyllodromiinae from Onehunga, Auckland 1061, New Zealand on December 08, 2021 at 12:45 PM by eucolaspis
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I that someone on Taxacom alerted the uploader to the correct ID, but after it briefly made it through to Research Grade, Hegg has ruined it yet again! Is there no stopping this rogue? iNat seems to be totally impotent and incapable of stopping him, choosing instead to attack me, who they seem to see as the weakest link    On Wednesday, 22 December 2021, 02:05:04 pm NZDT, Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> wrote:  

  Oops! Forgot to post the link: https://inaturalist.nz/observations/103169820
    On Wednesday, 22 December 2021, 02:03:27 pm NZDT, Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> wrote:  

  Hey everybody, iNat has a brand new observation of Balta bicolor, but I can't add an ID to it while I'm suspended. Feel free to do so. Maybe you would like to do the honours, Doug? Cheers, Stephen
    On Wednesday, 22 December 2021, 01:42:00 pm NZDT, Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> wrote:  

Hi Mike,Not quite correct assumptions on your part. Any "sock accounts" were accounts set up for legitimate purposes, with the local iNat staff in full knowledge, for some years now, of those accounts. They weren't actually involved in the resolving a flag against myself. That was just that I had made a comment which could, if you really wanted to interpret it that way, be interpreted as some kind of threat (not of violence or anything!), so they flagged it as such. I resolved the flag by clarifying what I meant by what I said. It was a perfectly plausible reading of what I had said, so, to my mind, I had resolved the flag. At worst, it was a minor mistake and hardly worth a suspension! The main point is that all this happened after I had tried to simply discuss the cockroach issue with Danilo, but to no avail. So yes, I was getting a bit annoyed, but I only reacted in ways which were small misdemeanours at worst. However, Charlie Hohn turned it into a kangaroo court (I can hear them chanting Witch, Witch, Witch!) I'm sure you would get a bit annoyed if someone had basically ruined about a week's worth of unpaid work by you, without prior discussion, and for the flimsiest of reasons. My personal view is that one f-word was quite appropriate, under the circumstances, but you are correct, Mike, that it has allowed my enemies to claim the moral high ground. Funny how trying to force someone off a platform is considered morally acceptable, for some strange reason! My information suggests that staff in California would have simply treated my actions here as the minor misdemeanours that they were, except for the "huge political pressure" bearing down on them from Charlie Hohn and his friends. I have offered to surrender my curator status and refrain from making any further comments on iNat (or else be suspended indefinitely). Unfortunately, because of the pressure being put on them, my information suggests that we will have a fight on our hands from this end to reduce a 1 year suspension.Cheers, Stephen    On Wednesday, 22 December 2021, 12:35:33 pm NZDT, Mike Sadka via Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:  

 Hi Stephen

> Sure, in retrospect, I could have handled things better, but hindsight is
a great thing!

Forethought is also good!

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of this, you admit to (a) "having said
the dreaded f-word" - in text presumably, meaning that you gave away any
moral high ground and provided evidence for your opponents to discredit
you, and (b) "other "sins" like resolving a flag against myself"
(presumably using the "sock account" mentioned previously) -
demonstrating that you are prepared to use underhand means to gain access
to and subvert the system in question.

So arguably you have stacked the cards against yourself.

Softly softly catchee monkey

On Tue, Dec 21, 2021 at 10:14 PM Stephen Thorpe via Taxacom <
taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:

>  Hi Geoff,
> Yes, that thread illustrates rather well some of the problems here. One
> problem is taxonomic, in that, surprise, surprise (not!), the taxonomy of
> this group of roaches in Australia is not particularly well known, so
> nobody seems to be confident about what the real Balta bicolor actually is,
> except perhaps for MPI, who would have followed certain standard
> identification protocols and clearly ended up with a result that they were
> confident enough to publish. They tend not to release too many details into
> the public domain, however, so we are just in a position of having to trust
> that they haven't screwed up massively!
> The taxonomic problem is, however, only one problem. Another problem is
> data management. In that regard, I maintain that for me to follow MPI's
> identification was not only a perfectly justifiable thing to do, but also
> arguably the best thing to do, so as to be able to straightforwardly
> compile and retrieve data on this invasive species in N.Z., especially on
> iNaturalist. So, Geoff, the following comment, from the page you posted the
> link to, is the killer:
> danilo_hegg commented: I think it should be identified as Ellipsidion,
> until the correct species can be resolved. As far as MPI goes, well, they
> got it wrong!
>
> The comment itself is fine. Danilo is just reporting what he thinks. I'm
> hearing you Danilo! You are perfectly entitled to think that. What you are
> not entitled to do is to steam ahead without further warning or discussion
> and roll back all 50 or so of my IDs of Balta bicolor observations, thereby
> ruining about 1 week's worth of unpaid work by me, carefully trying to
> compile and curate a portfolio of solid observations which can be used to
> document the distribution and spread of this invasive species in N.Z.!
> Danilo doesn't know if MPI got it wrong. He went on to call the ID "lazy",
> "dubious" and "lacking any evidence"!
> Unfortunately, I'm still not convinced that iNat staff, either here in
> N.Z., or in California, quite grasp the seriousness of what Danilo has
> done. Instead they seem more concerned with me having said the dreaded
> f-word and other "sins" like resolving a flag against myself, etc. I was
> scrambling to deal with Danilo's rogue approach to identifications and I
> had no idea what he was going to do next. Sure, in retrospect, I could have
> handled things better, but hindsight is a great thing! Now I'm the one
> facing a possible 1 year long suspension from iNaturalist!
> Cheers, Stephen
>    On Wednesday, 22 December 2021, 10:50:37 am NZDT, Geoff Read via
> Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> There's some possibly enlightening taxonomic discussion around the
> at-issue insect identification for New Zealand as Balta bicolor here:
>
> https://inaturalist.nz/observations/1256347
>
> For me it's a glimpse confirming how iNaturalist can be a useful forum for
> professional biologists to participate in and share information and
> discuss.  We are always combating incomplete information about what is out
> there, but the public don't know this until we tell them. iNaturalist is
> one place we can do that.
>
> Cheers,
> Geoff Read
>
> On Wed, December 22, 2021 9:41 am, Stephen Thorpe via Taxacom wrote:
> >  Hi Les,
> > In my current predicament and frame of mind, it would be very easy for me
> > to agree with your poor estimation of iNaturalist. However, it isn't
> > entirely accurate. This particular case is complicated.
>
> [... deleted...]
>
>
> --
> Geoffrey B. Read, Ph.D.
> Wellington, NEW ZEALAND
> gread at actrix.gen.nz
>
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