Short term, even if you could just warn people going to species on things like Sarcophaga and Psychodidae, that could be helpful. The most common ones are the ones which take the most energy.
Perhaps the flags could just be raised on these repeat offenders, where there is the most need… rather than even trying to conquer all species in all locations.
This is really only partially true at best. The out of range alerts cause a lot of false positives because they’re solely based on existing records that have been accepted by the NBN Atlas. This is usually out of date, and has a large number of gaps and omissions - so the information it provides is often quite misleading. The ID difficulty ratings are more useful, but they only cover a limited subset of UK species. The ratings are provided by the various taxon-specific recording schemes in the UK and are quite narrow in scope. They only offer brief advisory messages about what kinds of evidence the schemes require, and don’t usually offer any details about why the idenification might be difficult. Here’s an example:
These messages can be useful if you already have some recording experience, but it is very common for new users to be confused by them. There are many posts on the iRecord forum from people thinking the messages mean their records have been invalidated in some way. Ironically, the usual advice is to simply ignore them.
I don’t wish appear too negative about iRecord (which I also use myself), but I’m afraid your assessment here may be somewhat inaccurate.
Ok nice! Good to have some finer grain to my limited awareness of the iRecord system
The negative time costs resulting from any automation are a good point.
Any negative time costs to this action should be weighed against positive time gains though.
At present, on Sarcophaga photos ID’d to species, most identifiers might write a personalised note, explaining the difficulty. Every time every identifier writes a new note, adds a considerable net cost in identifier time to the overall process.
Lets say this is semi-automated and there is a button added for identifiers which when pressed gives the user a more formal note explaining the difficulty. Now identifiers only have to press a button instead of writing it out…but its doing pretty much the same thing. Would this be a worthwhile change in terms of time cost/gain?
This would also enable the logging of the button presses. So then lets say after a period of time, the buttons for genera which are just being pressed over and over again are just pressed in advance, forewarning the user automatically as @star3 suggested… or making a little symbol show up on the taxa in question, as @lm77 suggested. More time saved! Would this second change be worthwhile in terms of time cost/gain?
I would imagine the queries from users who receive an automated suggestion won’t be more significant than the existing queries identifiers have to grapple with person to person. In addition, this negative response to the automation could itself be generic, formalised and minimised… with FAQs, whats this buttons, etc…
The cost for the developers to implement though … is a whole other negative cost to factor in…
Sure. I know some do. I need to get round to it! I’m less organised :)
Whats the tool for it again?
In any case though …if some are using an automated message of their own and some not… this is just more evidence to build it in to the system in my book. Especially if iNaturalist wants to make the on-ramp for identifiers as smooth as possible…
I saved it on another platform and copy when start iding, as new people make common mistakes this copied message gose many times in a row. I would like to have an option to have saved messages, but not if it is pre-made by someone else.
For me, I would rather it was just generic.
Less personal means less chance of it being taken personally.
Plus, I’m not diplomatic enough to get the tone right so would rather it was written by a pro
I get that that makes it more impersonal though…which is another “cost” in the equation I guess…
Potentially, saved messages could still be logged in some way though…like button presses. This segues into other ideas floated on other threads too about saving the ID features folks mention - which is already in the pipeline by the look of it :
In the online world, it isn’t too hard to take a step-by-step approach. Features can be rolled out by taxa, by region, etc. Perhaps boiling the ocean with all regions/taxa is undoable, but starting small and learning what works and what doesn’t work seems like a good approach. The other way to look at it is “does it improve data accuracy”? That helps reduce the pressure for perfection.
it’s actually better to anticipate many of the the potential issues upfront so that you can create a foundation that will at least be flexible enough to handle things that will inevitably come up. just slapping something together for one place or taxa at a time and then adding as you go seems like a good way to create a lot of major rework, which is not a good thing.
Unless I feel like personalizing it, I just copy & paste from the frequent responses page (that’s what it’s there for, after all): https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses
I have personalized ones saved to an unpublished journal entry, so I have access to them on any device as long as I am logged into iNat.
I saved the link to responses to a journal post, but I usually end up googling “inat frequent responses”, because that takes me just as few clicks as visiting my list of iNat bookmarks.
I prefer to engage with new people by writing my own comment.
Out of the box copypasta comments - I dunno. Most of the professional scientists have their own set of comments to fit their own cases. I started to recognise and appreciate the … can’t ID Bougainvillea to species from this photo …
Sure…and I wouldn’t want to disable those who want to go the extra mile! I think enabling some people to have a short-cut copy pasted option if they want it though, would be great ( and could enable data to be harvested relating to it )
It shouldn’t be at the cost of people who prefer to write something personal each time though
This has not seen activity in a while but I think this is still an important topic. I agree that this would be a lot of work but focusing on the species groups that are most likely being confused would still be a big help for citizen science in learning how the distinguish species and/or learn that some are not distinguishable by morphology alone.
I have an example page that use a 3 level scale for distinguishability.
The German site kerbtier.de is focused on beetles and you can very quickly see whether a species is distinguishable by morphology. By looking at the green/yellow/red indicator.
A further step would be displaying a notification when people try to select a non-/hard to distinguish species and recommend staying on the genus level unless they are sure.
The last level of awesome would be if iNaturalist would give recommendations for how to distinguish hard to identify species. maybe including hints to use other clues than just visual appearance. For example: “This species cannot be distinguished by appearance but here is it’s distinct call!” “These species look the same. They can only be distinguished by dissecting and observing their reproductive organs. We recommend staying at the genus level”
Thanks for surfacing this old thread. I thought I’d commented on something similar somewhere but I’m not sure. I think something like this would indeed be valuable, and in response to concerns expressed above that it is a huge undertaking, I think it would be sufficient to automate it based on iNat identifications. We already have the ‘similar taxa’ functionality on the taxon page which is based on how many observations have disagreements. I’m sure it would be possible to judge the red/yellow/green system based on the number of, (or better - the proportion of) observations, in the taxon subject to disagreements/bump backs etc.
I’m not a UI designer and it’s the first time I used that tool. So I couldn’t get the hover function to work correctly. You’ll have to click somewhere to close the popup.
Your particular example is an interesting one because it raises the question of how geography affects difficulty. You’ve given Chorthippus brunneus a red. It’s very difficult to identify this species in continental Europe - but very easy to identify it in the UK where the similar species are absent. A more sophisticated algorithm for the colours might perhaps be able to use the geomodel to see if the range overlaps with the ‘similar taxa’, or perhaps might only use the proportion of disagreements within a geographical range.