[teruakohatu]

iNaturalist ranks right up there with Wikipedia in importance.

It is more than one organisation, but rather a central org + a network of regional organisations. The regional organisation provides a lot of biological technical expertise. Citizen scientists alone would not be able to correctly handle the complex taxonomic issues you have in biology… or even basic identification in many cases.

Where the organisation(s) sometimes go awry, in my personal opinion, is forgetting they are the custodian of citizen science data, not the source of it.

[mapmeld]

I had this same mindset, and when I travel to somewhere less-traveled, I always like to post photos on iNaturalist and map parks and trails on OpenStreetMap to contribute to the open tech ecosystem.

A year or so ago someone asked Reddit for examples of how iNaturalist is used by scientists. I go on Google Scholar and it's papers about crowdsourcing, community, classrooms. I didn't see papers where the data was part of researching the plants and animals (knowing where to study, unexpected sightings, changes over time) like Budburst. Maybe biologists are doing that off the record and I'm 100% wrong, but it shook my perception that these are observations and I should upload yet another desert gecko sighting.

[jg0r3]

I work in a large conservation organization focused on rare plant conservation.

iNaturalist is sometimes used by our ecologists/biologists as a starting point for collating occurrence data.

The iNaturalist data itself is likely specifically being pulled from gbif. Then they go private/specialty databases that have more spatially and taxonomically accurate records.

But iNaturalist data is often not considered high quality enough to be publishable by itself (wide brush statement) in my field of plant conservation.

We've tried to have some conversations with iNaturalist and they weren't really interest in talking, gave me pause on what their motives as an organization are.

But conservation tools are few and far between, and iNaturalist is a really powerful tool for initial data exploration.

[geokon]

It's interesting to contrast with Wikipedia. I'm not deeply involved with either, so I'm talking out of my ass and would be curious to hear other people's thoughts here. But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled. I'm guessing iNaturalist hasn't?

The OpenStreetMaps model is also interesting. Where they basically only provide the data and expect others to make Apps/Websites

That said, it's also interesting that there hasn't been any big hit with people building new apps on top of Wikidata (I guess the website and Android app are technically different views on the same thing)

[gbear605]

I’m not convinced that that’s an accurate view of Wikidata. Wikidata is a basically disconnected project. There is some connection, but it’s really very minimal and only for a small subset of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is 99% just text articles, not data combined together.

Frankly, I think the reason people haven’t built apps on top of Wikidata is that the data there isn’t very useful.

I say this not to diss Wikimedia, as the Wikipedia project itself is great and an amazing tool and resource. But Wikidata is simply not there.

[kyle-rb]

Wikidata is a separate project, specifically for structured data in the form of semantic triples [0]. It's essentially the open-source version of Google's KnowledgeGraph; both sourced a lot of their initial data from Metaweb's Freebase [1], which Google acquired in 2010.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database)

[bawolff]

> But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled.

A big part of that is that different language editions of wikipedia are very decoupled. One of the goals of wikidata was to share data between different language wikipedias. It needed to be decoupled so it was equal to all the different languages.

[tptacek]

Having never used iNaturalist, but as someone who believes that Wikipedia might be one of the most important knowledge resources created in the last 100 years, I'd love to hear more about why you think this.

[turtle_]

It’s a living biodiversity record. That kind of data has had an impact on things like: understanding human impact on the macro environment, ID new species, provide scientists with more accurate population distributions etc. Perhaps controversial, but the data has also been critical to computer science, specifically computer vision and AI algorithms. eg what’s the bird in this picture?

[nemo]

Between iNaturalist and Wikipedia, for me iNaturalist is the more significant of the two. I use iNat every day, have many tens of thousands of observations, and using it I've learned to identify thousands of birds, plants, bugs, fungi, and other things out there. Now I can name trees, plants, birds, et al, but more than that I understand better how they fit together into ecosystems. Also I've learned a lot of taxonomy which actually helps inform my view of the world a lot. In the process I've connected a lot more to nature, and thanks to iNat (and eBird) I now spent a lot more time doing meaningful things exploring wild spaces and spend less time scrolling on web pages. Wikipedia's invaluable as well, and completely indispensable, but between the two it's been less significant for me actually directly learning about the natural world I live in.

[chneu]

I use it a lot. My ex is a biologist and they use it a ton.

It's a massive dataset. There's nothing quite like it. The way people collaborate and verify information on iNat is invaluable.

The best thing about iNat is the passionate people on there. If you don't know an ID, just post it and within a day someone will correct it. It's crazy.

Download Seek and go try it out. Make sure to sign up for iNat and connect your seek to iNat so you can contribute.

[Abishek_Muthian]

I use it to ID cool insects I come across, I get responses within few minutes to hours.