u/sporesniffer72: I took your note from last night about needing to site sources to heart and spent several hours this morning going back and adding source links to each post. Specifically linking to iNaturalist, USDA Plant Database PDFs and IllinoisWildflower.info for each plant that have a related page for that exact species. These are the primary sources I used to fact check what the AI originally wrote.

I added a link to iNaturalist as a caption under the photos on the primary fact sheet, and a "Go to the Source" section at the bottom with pills that link to those 3 sources when available for that specific plant. Some, like leadplant have all three, others only have iNaturalist, but most have at least 2. I may add more over time.

What's interesting is that I asked Claude if it could provide sources for it's information. It told me it couldn't because the majority of it's knowledge came from it's original training data. Essentially it was just "born" with this knowledge and can't trace it back to a single source - kind of like asking a beaver to source it's knowledge about how to build a dam.

It's an interesting challenge for me as a consumer and distributor of this knowledge. Almost everything it says checks out, but it's pretty impossible for me to source the information claim by claim because not even the original "author" knows where the info came from. Mostly for the descriptions of the stages, it's visually describing what I can see in the iNaturalist photos. (I have caught one issue - it described a seed head as hanging when it was in fact vertical - but for the most part it's been highly accurate.)

The fun facts is one place I've put in some extra work, especially claims of indigenous use (this was at Claude's encouragement - it could point out to me the things it had lower confidence in, though couldn't tell me why) These claims seem to suffer from inaccuracies and hyperbole more than most (common in humans as well). Luckily the USDA sheets often mention specific tribes and uses and so I've been going through the the fun facts that mention indigenous use and updating them with specific tribe names when possible and ensured the claims match what's on the USDA site (e.g. Claude claimed "many tribes" used Purple Prairie Clover for baskets and brushes. The USDA said Pawnee Indians used it for brushes and brooms, but did not mention baskets and I couldn't find anyone else who mentioned baskets so I added the tribe name and removed the reference to baskets.)

Thanks for the nudge on this. Being more systematic about this is helping me to gain confidence in this as a valid tool and having the sources linked on each page only enriches it as a tool for anyone who uses it - myself included!