On the importance of raising awareness of properly tagging observations of cultivated plants in Europe

I totally agree with your viewpoint, this is not a gardening website and this should be highlighted on the home page more clearly. I am sometimes flabbergasted by some of the observations that are posted. A plant in a pot on your balcony is not acceptable! I think the final option should be a flagged for deletion or inappropriate material option to be operated by approved verificators as these records are just cluttering up the system and demeaning the real and valuable records and the value of the website itself.
I would also like to make one comment about member profiles. John is a Naturalist does not mean anything. There are always novices, amateurs, educated, experienced and professional members so why not distinguish this and either create a verificator hierarchy or state who and what you are.

The distribution of cultivated plants is useful for science, so I do not advocate deleting these observations. However, they should be clearly annotated as cultivated, though the line is often blurred.
I suspect that some form of artificial intelligent algorithm could easily be trained to identify suspect observations.

I agree that it should be easy to tag observations as "not wild". The amount of observed cultivated roses, for example, takes quite some time: Check image and locality, scroll down, tag.

There is one method observations are autotagged as cultivated by iNat.:

"The system will vote that the observation is not wild/naturalized if there are at least 10 other observations of a genus or lower in the smallest county-, state-, or country-equivalent place that contains this observation and 80% or more of those observations have been marked as not wild/naturalized."

A global issue, not just European. In SE Asia, where most of my attention is directed, observations posted from Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines are particularly rife with unmarked observations of cultivated plants. Much of this, at least in SE Asia, seems to be due to a lack of clear communication of the intended function of iNat from the outset to the end user. A dialogue from earlier today to illustrate the lack of awareness: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/10200929
Along the lines of @bobwardell 's suggestion above, perhaps some sort of an iNat 'mission statement' can clarify and communicate this to all new account creators in a way that is sensitive to the diversity of interests that various users might have, and also in a way that still encourages use of the platform.

AI tagging would certainly be a great idea. This will probably generate a few mistake, but eventually will leave substancially less work to correct that non tagging would do to ID properly.

Problem is mainly due to, imho, the mobile app - very simplified from the web version, thus far more accessible. Very usefull, with far more people - I use this with my own pupils - but on side aspect is that it drains in the community people not concerned by the project. I don't blame them, iNat is a very usefull tool, and this should go on. But this generate problems like this that we'll have to deal with.
Many people - if not most - using the mobile app (I mean, ONLY the mobile app) simply don't understand where the ID is coming from, and what iNaturalist is made for. They simply want a quick ID of what they watched.

Though generating problems to be solved, this type of users is however good to the community, I think. They generate data, some getting this way more involved into nature understanding and conservation, and can eventually become regular users, some simply watching very interesting obs. without even knowing about that (I must check, but I think I remember the first obs. of Spilostethus from US was made on the mobile app., if I don't mistake, for example...).
In many, if not most cases, warning could be useless, because some type of users simply don't take it in consideration, simply ponctually looking for a quick ID. Warning should be kept on, though, as sometimes usefull, but AI automatised tagging would be a good idea, as a beginning. What ever would be the ID algorithm, it could be improved later if causing trouble, but the principle remains a very good idea, I think.

The algorithm suggested by @bouteloua would be just a start; it could be improved with time, e. g. by checking a local list of known escaped / naturalised species.
Plus, those species would still be to be IDed : identifiers could further recognise them as "wild", and manually remove the automatical "non-wild" tag. Of course, one of the main condition of the bot would be not to overpass a human user, i. e. not to remove a manually "wild" tagged obs, only to tag some of the untagged with a "non-wild" tag...

Think you should download and try the app - at least to see how it works, this is instructive, to understand where many of the obs. you check do come from; even for experimented users, it can be of some use, as, though very simplified, it automaticallly add GPS coordinate and date : for example, I use it for species mapping : just looking to specimens, not to care about date or place, and photograph them. The app will then use the automatically generated time/place data of the photo to create the obs., just have to add the name (if known...)

Another great thing for identifiers would be the mobile app-made obs. to be notified more clearly (it is currently, but not in a very visible way, I think...)

Totally agree! Though sometimes it is hard to tell - for instance in grassfield, gardens, etc. When I am travelling I take also pictures of grasses and weeds for instance.

OMG...
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/18075642

There has to be a delete option for this type of ………….!

Could AI used in Inat automatically refuse such stupidities as toilet paper or human faces, or other stuff unrelated to Inat?

On the subject of human faces - I was wondering what the justification of having Homo sapiens in the database anyway was? and obviously the next time I photograph a Homo erectus or a Homo neanderthalensis walking down the street I will surely add my record to iNat! LOL!

Well, though spotting H. sapiens is clearly not the first aim on iNat, as the database is automatically incremented by external names providers, then it is necessary in the database; as Cassi noticed before, most of human faces spotting are the result of trials, mistakes, etc. rather than true malevolence;
therefore, simply properly identifying them as H. sapiens makes unnecessary tagging as spam.
The algorithm integrates H. sapiens ID in the research level score : being tagged as H. sapiens makes it exactly the same as non wild, no direct evidence, etc.

So, most of time, this is not really a problem, except when a picture of another person is posted (and often badly used...) against his/her will...

I saw once various obs. of what appeared to be students' obs. , figuring who was manifestlyanother student, or even the teacher himself, and tagging him badly, as, e.g., Toad, Badger, etc.
I suppose teacher using the app with their student then watch over their work... I, personnaly, do. This personnaly never happened to me, but I suppose my own student are aware, or, at least, fearfull, of what could happen to them if I ever discovered a tagging of another student, or myself, as an insulting animal... Teachers leading students and guiding them on iNat should be able to manage them, I think. And I can be pretty imaginative in case of such dysfunctions... :D

After all, I think that both teachers and parents should be responsible for what their students/children do on iNaturalist.
It is good that on the web there is something like iNat that is useful to spread the knowledge on natural sciences, but this should not allow kids to do everything on iNat as well as adults to let kids do everything on iNat.

How to create a project without informing how to behave on iNat and its consequences:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/penang-intersecondary-school-city-nature-challenge-2019

more than 50000 observations, mostly of cultivated plants and captive animals, practically none has reached research grade. What is the meaning of these initiatives?