Description of need: Currently when you post 200 observations a person who knows IDs is equally likely to look at any one of them. And me, who does ID things can click through 200 observations that are blurry blobs and one observation that is in focus and is very interesting to me, but if I don’t know the ID I have no way to highlight that observation to other people. In order to resolve this some users tag people, they believe can help with an ID. But those people don’t necessarily want to be tagged at all or for that particular observation.
Feature request details: I would like a button to be added next to “favorite” that says “please ID” or “boost” and when a user goes to the identify tab on the website in addition to sorting by “most favorite” they can sort by “most ID requests”. This classification will hopefully cut down on unwanted tagging, and give identifiers satisfaction knowing that they are identifying observations someone cares about and is interested in rather than just 1 of 200 photos no one ever looks at again.
Platform(s): web?
Description of need:
Currently when you post 200 observations a person who knows IDs is equally likely to look at any one of them, which is a shame because some observations are more interesting than others. When I am identifying things I can click through 200 observations that are blurry blobs and one observation that is in focus and is very interesting to me, but if I don’t know the ID I have no way to highlight that observation to other people. In order to resolve this some users tag people, whom they believe can help with an ID. But those people don’t necessarily want to be tagged at all or for that particular observation.
Feature request details:
I would like a button to be added next to “favorite” that says “please ID” or “boost” and when a user goes to the identify tab on the website in addition to sorting by “most favorite” they can sort by “most ID requests”. This classification will hopefully cut down on unwanted tagging, and give identifiers satisfaction knowing that they are identifying observations someone cares about and is interested in rather than just 1 of 200 photos posted by children during class who will never log in again.
What about overuse?:
To prevent this “please ID” button from being abused we could set limits by either 1) only enabling it once a post is 1 month old. and/or 2) only allowing each user one “please ID” a week.
TLDR: I found a really cool post I don’t have the skills to ID and I don’t want to tag a dozen people who I don’t know.
Tag one person at a time. Wait a while. If no response tag the next one. (Been going thru blurry blobs left over from CNC – enough for today ;~) But I did find 2 in focus, which I could ID.
It is also worth adding a broad ID, if you can. I have learnt (painfully) that dicot does get a response … often.
I might be too complex but what if you earn ID tags by doing ID somehow. So 10 good ideas and you can flag one thing. And people would need to seek it out “see ID requests” so no one can feel bad about it bothering them?
All users, or maybe all users with accounts greater than 1 month old would get a limited number of “please ID” requests. Can be on their own observations or anyone else’s.
I’ve had to deal with the fallout from users putting in a lot of incorrect identifications before. Maybe they did it just to get on the leaderboard (granted, this can only be speculation on my part). I’d rather encourage users to help identify observations because they want to help not because they get some type of reward.
Tagging fellow identifiers is always an option. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, either way it’s still an option. An alternative approach was conceived by @lynnharper. It’s called Cooperative Plant Identifying in New England and New York. It’s especially useful for those observations that require multiple identifiers to overturn an incorrect ID, but without the hassle of tagging. It works.
All uploads to iNat are automatically ‘please ID’, that’s a large part of the point of the site and a major the reason for uploading.
I recommend patience. Also making IDs for others and joining relevant projects are good ways to get others to look at your uploads and assist with IDs.
In my opinion there is zero need for a ‘please ID’ button. That’s more of a Facebook or Reddit type thing.
Honestly, instead of this I’d prefer to see people encouraged to be a bit more ready to declare something unidentifiable and moved to Casual. Because there are just so many blurry blobs that can never seriously be identified…
When everyone will start pressing the button, it will turn into a bad situation. It will naturally be over- and mis- used. The identifiers would be happier to respond to a tag than watch a hundred “pls. id” observations. I have no problem with being tagged. And I do not think it is a problem for other identifiers. Just try not to tag me on 100 observations of the same species and overload me notifications. Again, I prefer having a bombardment in the notifications instead of an overload of “pls. id”. Always I log into see 20-40 notifications everyday and I am used to it. A few tags on cool observations won’t hurt, may even result in a first id or something. I also prefer being tagged by an identifier. Why? Because every observer sees “lifer” while I am being tagged on the same species by multiple observers. And identifiers know “it’s so common” or “it is strange”, so they know when to tag.
While I definitely agree in principle, there are a lot of situations where someone who really knows their stuff can pull an accurate ID out of an image that’s an unrecognizable blur to others.
I’m happy to let those sit.
I do wish people were better about marking wild/not wild though.
That circles back to – please separate Not Wild / Wild from Needs ID. Then observers will not be ‘forced’ to leave it at ‘Wild’ to get an ID. And identifiers can filter out actual Wild obs.
I’m close to 100,000 IDs and I’m just starting to do Captive / Cultivated. Maybe that would be a good thing to do as an ID break. Plants are lowing-hanging fruit there, since many are in pots.
Apologies, I forgot that this is the duplicate of a previous request, which we declined. I’m going to do so here as well, and set this to close in four hours.