In which Wildbook did the issue occur? SHARKBOOK
I am an administrator, and the way I usually check what sharks I need to review is to see what has been uploaded since they will always be unapproved. However, when users are using the bulk import I have noticed that encounters are coming across as approved. This is disrupting my system entirely and risking that I don’t review new sharks.
Please can you check the bulk import to see if it marks the metadata status as approved?
This behavior is intentional and not a bug. Because the bulk import workflow is only accessible to authorized users, the encounters are uploaded as approved if the Encounter.state field is not set.
I need to talk to your team about re-evaluating this position about defaulting encounter uploads as approved. It really is problematic. Approved means that a human has processed it - and the fact that bulk uploads are coming through as approved is not ok.
Please can we discuss this one?
We’re not likely to change this as it would affect the behavior across all Wildbooks and there is a work around to uploading your bulk imports as unapproved. I should have clarified that in my earlier reply instead of assuming it was implicit in the doc I linked to. 
If you add the field Encounter.state to your spreadsheet and enter the value for each encounter as “unapproved” your imported encounters will remain unapproved. When this field is excluded, the default is to assume they are approved. It’s important to enter “unapproved” in lower-case as this field is case-sensitive.
A full explanation of this field and others are in our docs. I recommend using Ctrl + F (or Cmd + F if on a Mac) when searching for specific field names and their descriptions on this page.
Have you asked other users across Wildbooks? I am confident that I would not be the only one to find the default position confusing.
Support and Feature Request posts in this forum are the places where users can raise any issue with the Wildbook experience. So far, this specific issue has not been a point of contention, especially since there’s a straightforward solution to uploading imported encounters as unapproved.
Hi @Anastasia - I am using the bulk upload feature and the template spreadsheet doesn’t even include a field for you to load the approval status - so whilst you are saying that the feature allows users to set the status as “unapproved” it is not clear to me how.
I really do not think that this default “approved” status makes any sense. How can you approve the encounter if you have not mapped the encounter to an individual?
Please can you raise this with Jason -I feel very strongly that bulk uploads need to come through as unapproved.
See this previous bulk upload file from just a few months ago - the photos did not load as approved. They all came through as unapproved as default. This is as it should be. Its only been making bulk uploads come through as approved recently. https://www.sharkbook.ai/import.jsp?taskId=7e28252a-d0a3-4718-a6f9-dbc220862b53
Approved and unapproved only means that an encounter has or has not been reviewed and accepted by a researcher. Whether or not an animal has been given an identity is reflected in the MarkedIndividual.individualID column and the Identity section of the encounter page.
The standard template is only meant as a starting point for entering your data. It does not include every supported field in Wildbook; just the most commonly used ones across all platforms. We can’t anticipate every field a researcher will need to use to record their data, so we leave it up to each person to use it as a starting point to build their own template that works best for them.
I previously linked to the full list of supported bulk import fields in our help docs. You would just need to enter Encounter.state in a new row in your spreadsheet and use Excel’s Fill function to copy “unapproved” for all of the encounters in the column.
I did mention it to Jason and we’re in agreement. It takes less time to add a new column to the spreadsheet than it does to create a support request to oppose it.
I’m going to email you a template with the Encounter.state field included to reduce some of the friction here. You can try a test import with it using 1-3 encounters to see if this version addresses what you need.