From New York Times (Paywall)
The Nicest Place Online? It Might Just Involve Identifying Sea Slugs.
By Amy Harmon
As civil discourse online and off increasingly proves elusive, a website devoted to identifying plants and animals may be teaching humans how to get along.
When Merav Vonshak wanted to identify the gelatinous blob she had photographed floating in a shallow pool of water on a family vacation, she bypassed a wildlife-related website too often beset by bickering. She gave no consideration to brand-name social media platforms known for snark or misinformation.
Instead she uploaded the picture to a site called iNaturalist, where strangers have come together to pursue a very specific type of truth: the correct scientific classification for the living things they photograph in the wild or the backyard. They have so far processed about 90 million, with at least a quarter completed in 2022 alone...
Ken-ichi Ueda, who co-created iNaturalist in 2008 and continues to run it with his co-director, Scott Loarie, said the site’s evidence-based ethos is also bolstered by the fact that users can’t just mark identifications as incorrect.
Ken-ichi Ueda graduated from the MIMS program in 2008. iNaturalist began as a MIMS FInal Project with fellow alums Nate Agrin and Jessica Kline.
