No, it's confusing but as far as I can tell what they're saying there is that if a species was ever photographed anywhere before, outside of iNaturalist, that species can't be part of the project at all. It's a page for people on iNaturalist who have captured the first known photo of a species.
Did you actually look at the details? It's literally in rule #1:
> 1 . Any observations you add must be the first photograph(s) of that species anywhere. If an observation is the first one for that species to be uploaded to iNat, but other photos of that species from an earlier point in time already exist anywhere elsewhere online/in print, then that observation should not be added to the project. This is the biggest source of observations that I have to remove from the project. So your observation must be both the first photograph of that species on iNat and also the first anywhere.
I just realized on re-reading your comment that you are actually agreeing with my main point (but it's too late to edit my other comment), you're just saying that I wasn't confident enough in stating it.
I was just trying to be polite with the "as far as I can tell", really. Of course I did look at the details, otherwise I wouldn't know them.
