Forgive me, but could not you use this?
(But sub in your own user id)
to quickly know who is identifying your observations?
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Problem there is which of those people has uploaded observations of Bees? I could go through them one by one (and I have for my ten), but I have 914 people who have put ID’s on my stuff, I’m not going to put them in name by name only to find out that this one only places ID’s and has no observations, and that one never uploaded any Bees, and this one did but they’re from Europe and I can’t help them.
What I want here is another filter on the ID page so I can set a taxon and region that I know, and who has helped me (or actively helps others) before.
This could be a way to incentivize more people to try out identification and I’m really glad to see people engaging in constructive brainstorming around how to get that done. So I appreciate that you took the risk & put in the effort to put the idea forward, @neylon.
But, at the same time I’m skeptical as to whether this kind of feature would really be that helpful. I tend to agree, in part, with many of the critiques others have put forward in response to the proposal.
I would disagree with @cthawley that it would excessively “incentivize bulk IDing” and “careless IDs”. People who choose to observe, share their observations, and who hope for their observations to get IDed probably also tend to be people who value nature, people, and iNat enough to not behave with callous recklessness. I’m not too worried about that here. There will always be a few people who behave… **ahem**… differently.
But I do have two other reasons for saying that this isn’t really necessary:
(1) As someone who does a bit of ID’ing, having experienced the time and effort adding IDs requires, I tend to be more patient about my own observations getting IDs, whether concurring, corrective, or refining. I realize it takes time. And I don’t need some kind of algorithmic bump to speed up the process. Frankly, I’d far rather that some newbie get to experience that feeling of excitement from having his observation get IDed before my observation gets IDed. I’d want to see him get hooked.
(2) I can (and often do) personally go to look through the observations of those who have IDed some of my observations. It’s usually just a quick peek to see if there’s something within the scope of my knowledge. That seems a practical step which requires no extra feature and it’s a much more personal & meaningful way to say “thanks”. Interpersonal aspects of iNat really are a big part of what makes it such a rich experience. Using an algorithmic tweak to try to express appreciation or “reward” hard workers this might detract a little bit from those more heartfelt expressions.
And now that you’ve compelled me to reflect on this, I need to go say “thank you” to a couple regular identifiers!
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And identifiers are waiting, not so patiently, for the notifications update we have been promised for years.
Now I have 170 UNsorted to work thru.
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(Offhand I would say you can dispense with John Ascher. He rarely observes.)
If I might make one suggestion?
If you only wish to identify bees and only bees from your part of the world and focus on bees from those who have identified for you, I would say your best bet is to visit your identifiers list frequently enough that their names become familiar to you, perhaps not all 914, but maybe those who have identified more than X number of times, where X is the number you choose.
Then perhaps set your taxon and location and look out for those names, giving them an extra bit of attention. If you have decided that you want to pay special attention to those individuals who have identified fifty or more times for you, that is 18 people (not including Dr. Ascher).
Let’s say it is bees of the US. That looks like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=1&taxon_id=630955 (Of course, yes.)
You can even add in individuals as you think of them. Let’s say it is me – Look I have none in the US: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=1&taxon_id=630955&user_id=itsmelucy.
BUT! I do have some bees I bet you could identify to a higher level than I am able even though I do not live in your preferred area, because you know a lot about bees.
So let us remove the area, now that looks like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=630955&user_id=itsmelucy
This is all to say if you wish to thank your identifiers by identifying their bees, I would encourage you to do so even if they live outside your usual range, just by identifying to the highest taxonomic level to which you are able, which is likely higher than most people just given your special interest in bees.
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I don’t see a single reason why you can’t create a url with all names added there, are you trying to check all 900 people? Check the top 50, it’s easy, you can even do one by one, by time of discussing this new feature you would check all of those people.
Yeah are a lot of things that would make life easier for identifiers: better notifications for one, a way that would make it easier to tag the people who ID’d observation, a way to flag duplicates, ect.
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There’s a lot of things that I could do instead of this, not the least of which is place ID’s. But as I said previously: I have checked through my top identifiers before, and even hit the ones further down the list if I saw they did a bunch (operative word there is: If). And since I’ve done that before, I would like a quicker way to do it in future. Because whether I’m doing this on the forum, or rooting through someone’s observations looking for something I can help with, there’s one thing I’m not doing: placing ID’s.
But you say you only id bees, so you filter for bees in the id tab and only change usernames, it takes a couple of seconds, I support your request, you just unintentionally make it sound harder than it is now.
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Not exactly. A “couple of seconds” adds up. That also doesn’t get into the other part of this, which wanting to throw some ID’s towards the other people placing ID’s, whether they ID’d my stuff or not.
We were actually joking about this at work the other day: I used to have a boss who would constantly tell people to add things to their daily schedule that were “just a couple of seconds” (eg “while you’re out there doing that, do this too, it’ll just take a couple of seconds”), but by the time all those extra couple of seconds were added on, we would end up scrambling to get the days work done.
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There is an identifier gap between the highly skilled scientists or committed enthusiasts, and the lots of obs but no IDs.
Which is where I sit as a non-scientist second-tier identifier. iNat needs to actively recruit more of us. People who can and will do the first rough sorting, or simple annotations - it’s a caterpillar. If there was someone working thru Plantae where @ajott and @neylon have an ID backlog …
Another courtesy to skilled identifiers would be - if you have ASKED for their help, and they have given you an ID. Respond, react, withdraw your wrong ID at least. Obviously not the people on this thread! But I had one yesterday - 2 wrong, 4 right, and iNat forces us to waste … must be more than two thirds. Why can’t 4 out of 6 win?? Double the usual ‘2 is enough’ - should be acceptable.