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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

Why do you recommend Seek? I’ve been using the iNat app (though since it was released, they’ve been asking me to upgrade to the newer app) and it seems fine. Take a picture or upload an existing one, get recommendations for ID, then upload to the community for further consensus!

Seek is annoying, because it throws up some kind of „please don‘t disturb nature“ dialog box every time you start it to take a photo. I hve seen that warning hundreds of times, why can‘t i disable it after a few confirmations?

I‘ve moved to the main iNaturalist app, and it does everything Seek does, but better and it’s generally also faster.

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

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