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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jurek" data-source="post: 3205765" data-attributes="member: 3357">I recently had a bad experience in Turkey. I used observations from online Observado.org to find some patchily distributed birds (eg. Ruppell's Warbler, Olive-tree Warbler, Semicollared Flycatcher) away from the known stake-outs. Few of these observations worked. About half were however completely wrong - you go to a place where an observer claimed to see multiple singing males of 4 songbird species, and there is not one of any of them and very poor habitat. And you clearly are in the same place as on the map. The only explanation I had is that people putting these records were very inexperienced beginners. But their records mixed with reliable ones in an online database for eternity, with no way of separate them. I found it very disturbing in a discipline which relies on faith so much. And worse, in future, likely ornithologists will use data from these online databases in publications. And try to convince themselves and the readers that the number of data trumps quality of the data. In this case, records in the past and no records later will probably be interpreted that the local habitat got degraded.</blockquote>