Hi Jay,
When I was the reviewer for Multnomah County I had the same problem. Almost all
the problematic lists were located at the spot you described. I routinely
invalidated all the species on those lists because reporting a Brown Creeper
near Voodoo Donuts is confusing to the public and wrong in so many ways. (At
that time it wasn’t possible to make an entire list not public.) I agree with
your thinking on this issue. I really never found one of those lists where it
would have been appropriate to leave it public. I will let other reviewers
comment about possible ways to make multiple lists non-public all at once.
Joe Blowers
On Mar 29, 2020, at 5:11 PM, Jay Withgott <withgott@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Fellow Reviewers —
OK, here’s a dilemma of mine, and I’m wondering if there’s an easy fix that I
don’t know about….
If a person goes to submit a checklist and clicks on “Select an entire city,
county, state, or country” and then opts to specify a city, eBird creates a
location pin for them in a certain spot in that city and allows them to fill
out and submit their checklist. Lots of people have done this for Portland,
and their lists end up in a spot in the middle of downtown about 3 blocks
from Voodoo Donuts.
I had been under the impression that such location-imprecise country-,
state-, county-, and city-level lists were automatically made “Not Public”
and that their data was not shown on the maps and their rarities did not come
into our queues. But at least for the “Portland” location, that is not the
case.
In my opinion there is no way that these Portland lists should be public —
many of them aggregate birds from multiple locations and habitats all across
the city, and many others do not specify where the observers truly were
(though they were clearly nowhere near Voodoo Donuts).
So my first question is: Is this a technical glitch or oversight, and should
these lists have been automatically made not public?
And my second question is: If it wasn’t a glitch, then what is the easiest
way at this point for me to make these lists not public? Can I somehow do so
en-masse, or at least in groups according to the observer? There are over
200 such lists, and while I recognize that it’s the right thing to do to
inspect and judge them one-by-one, I’ve skimmed through a few dozen so far
and all of them are problematic in some way. To do them one-by-one is a time
sink, and contacting the observers about it adds more time.
I understand why in a sparsely birded region in the developing world we might
want to enable publicly mapped imprecise locations from cities, but in a
place like Portland it detracts far more than it adds. So I wonder if it is
possible to request that eBird Central automatically make non-public the
location-imprecise lists from designated cities when reviewers from the
affected regions request this?
As always, apologies if I’m missing something blindingly obvious.
Thanks, all, for any feedback,
Jay
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