Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: Website
URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:
Description of need:
The current ID page of a profile is not very useful, as it only shows the most recent IDs and it is a pain to look through. We currently have a way to check a profile’s general location based on the observation map with a user profile filter, but not one for their IDs. We can also check what taxa they like to post most often on the species section of the same page. However, some people are much more active IDing than observing, or they are comfortable/confident IDing in places where they may not have as many observations themselves. Similarly, they might be very confident IDing certain taxa and have many IDs in a specific clade that may or may not match what is observed.
Feature request details:
I would like to see a better way to visualize a person’s IDs, similar to the way observations are done, with a map page, species/taxa page, and observers page. Something similar to this heatmap (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/map?ident_user_id=diederik_7#2/0/0), but formatted the way observations are, so that species/taxa is also available. This way, I can see what their area of expertise is, and what/where they identify most. More importantly, this can allow users to visualize their own, and other’s IDs just like we do for observations.
So, when a person in its home country is active about a species group, he should not be “qualified enough” to do other IDs to other (broader) species levels around the world, or depending on personal interest?
Clearly against it. But good to know, that is of basic interest, when spending my free time to ID other persons observations and its not welcome, because I’m coming from the wrong species group, when as a botanist helping with IDing animals or vice versa.
I think the point is that if you are trying to find someone to ask for help with identifications, looking at where they make observations and what those observations are of does not make it easy to tell what they have experience identifying. And the Identifications tab currently doesn’t make it easy to get a summary of what people identify the same way the Observations tab does. So there is no easy way to realize that, for example, someone mainly observes plants in a small geographic area but also makes lots of bird identifications at a continental scale.
Waves back from Cape Town - the heat maps are fun. And a reminder to step out of your comfort zone to help ID where you can.
@chbluete active identifiers quickly learn who is active where - and for example - who is ploughing thru the proteas with me, who has good intentions (me), and who has The Knowledge. I do not think the initial intention was to exclude identifiers - more - who can I ask to help break this ‘trapped at dicots’. Or who shall I ask for this African fern ? botanarchiste !
This overview would still take us back to the leaderboard problem - I still have to evaluate whether higher numbers are enthusiasm / taxon sweep (OK that works), lower numbers perhaps deeper knowledge of a few taxa.
Yeah, I don’t think this is the purpose of this request. I get tagged dozens of times per day in observations that I have zero expertise in, because the Leaderboards misleadingly suggest that the observation is in my wheelhouse. For example, if you post a bagworm moth in Thailand and ID it as “Tineoidea”, my name pops up as the “top identifier”. This is only because I identify a particular genus in this superfamily on the other side of the world. If clicking on my profile showed a map of where I ID things, one would not come to the mistaken conclusion that I know anything at all about Thai bagworms. I don’t think anyone wants to judge the IDs you make based on how “typical” they are for you; they just want to know what is or isn’t reasonable to tag you in to ask questions about.
And, you can also search for disagreements using “&disagreements=true”. Lots of mixing and matching you can do with this method, with search features described in this forum article!
that solution generally works, but in some contexts, taxon from an identified observation may be different from the taxon of the actual identification. to get “species” from actual identifications and few other identifier-related stats, you can use: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_identifier_stats?user_id=diederik_7.
Yes, like Bugber and Paul_dennehy mentioned, it is not to discredit people’s IDs, the whole point of iNaturalist can be used by anyone and are weighed equally. Just like Paul_dennehy said, the leaderboard put me at or near the top of clinid fishes, and I sometimes get tagged for help with australian or californian species, but I am not very well versed in those.
The purpose of this is that let’s say: there is an expert in australian anemones, but they live in England, so now they only post about let’s say birds. So when I look at their observations it will not show neither Australia, nor anemones, but with this feature I will be able to see that they have many IDs in Australian anemones, so I can ask for their help with those.
This is actually essentially what I was talking about! It would just be very useful if there was a link to it from a profile’s page. This is great in the meantime though!
