iNaturalist in the New York Times
Thank you for earning iNaturalist the reputation as the nicest place online!
We're thrilled iNaturalist was featured on the front page of the Sunday New York Times in a very interesting piece written by @amy_harmon. And we're also extremely proud of iNaturalist's reputation that her article celebrates as a positive, collaborative, and constructive corner of the internet. This is a reflection of you - the incredible community of participants who use iNaturalist. Thank you so much for all of the knowledge, kindness, and passion you've given and continue to give to this site.
You can check out the article here (link will work for non-subscribers) and there's a thread about the article on the iNat forum.
The word cloud below was generated from 1,000,000 words randomly selected from the ~200,000 comments posted to iNaturalist in the last month. I made it because I was hoping to see Thank and Please featured prominently, and they are :)
Comments
Amazing….
I love this visuaization! And I agree that iNat is a pleasantly friendly, positive space compared to other sides. A reason I got hooked.
Love the word cloud! I also see "help," "think," "agree," "correct," "right," "best," "interesting" and "probably" in there. And I love author Amy Harmon's suggestion to scroll the "real time discussions" (a tab on one's dashboard page of intaturalist.org). We should all do that once a day to experience the refreshingly positive atmosphere on iNaturalist.
It was a really wonderful read that highlights the community aspects of iNaturalist!
Amy really did us proud with that article!
Nicely written article that sums up one of the best things about iNat! When I was a noob (and making plenty of noob mistakes), I was so pleasantly surprised by the welcoming atmosphere here. Thanks to everyone who contributes to maintaining that collaborative spirit :)
iNaturalist really deserves being recognized by its importance to scientific world.
''randomly selected'' and all words are English?
(u, y also...
Not all the 1M randomly selected words in the data were English. Re: the word cloud that I made from the data, I see "la", "gracias", "que" and some others. You can read more on what the algorithm I used does here. I used the default settings which still does a lot of things, like consolidating plurals and removing some common words ("the", etc.).
One word that caught my eye was "mentalfloss" 😄
Amy did a good job with her article, and I think there will be more folks joining up!
That's so awesome! I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the "teenager from Florida" was me!
Yep, that was you! Just goes to prove a young person can teach an older person sometimes.
So proud of us all and a great tribute to the iNaturalist community. May it be contagious . . .
I love the word cloud, so great!
I am probably to blame for unix_time and mentalfloss. I was re-going through images that had dates of 1969-12-31, mainly because of the Android App bug 2 years ago. So I have a link to the Wikipedia page about he unix_time stamp and article from MentalFloss describing why devices would display 1969-1970 dates.
Readers of the print edition should know that an editing error mis-credited at least three photos. My photo of an oak gall -- take from this observation https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/77658003 with permission -- was credited to another iNat user on the front page, and our names were flipped on images on the inside page. The online version of the story, which came out earlier, has the images correctly credited.
@weecorbie Lol, also "Unix_time".
Fantastic story, congrats everyone!
@jared_lincenberg hahaha, i was wondering about those!
It what such a lovely read!
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