Hello! I’m new to the forums, and an iNat observer for ~3 years. I started out with essentially no identification knowledge, and I’m still fairly clueless, but learning a thing or two through the help of other users has been a very enjoyable process. I also admin a project documenting biodiversity o…

[image] rikef: The more I know, the less confident I become in my identifications … I understand what you are saying. But when I see an observation that has been stuck at genus for six years without follow-up, I can’t help but wonder how many like you saw it and then passed by because they we…

… maybe it depends a lot in the organisms one is IDing, but in my area of expertise there are hundrets, if not thousands of observations with bold initial IDs no spider experts ever touched, because nobody wants to deal with all the unsatisfying backlash of pushing them back to genus. Those bold IDs…

[image] jasonhernandez74: my going ahead and being bold resulted in someone else adding an ID the very next day In the identify tab, it is possible to sort observations by date updated. This includes things like people adding a different ID. So it may well be that it was not “being bold” (th…

I sympathize with this, and I realize I am probably not the typical user in this respect, but if I make an unjustified species ID on any of my spider observations, please know that you are welcome to push them back to whatever level is suitable. I generally try to ID my spiders in accordance with my…

[image] spiphany: I realize I am probably not the typical user in this respect, but if I make an unjustified species ID on any of my spider observations, please know that you are welcome to push them back to whatever level is suitable honestly, I’ve hardly ever run into pushback when identify…

I do not complain about honest mistakes… that is fine, I have done them a lot myself, thinking I have a strong case for a certain ID and being corrected later… I talk for example about a pair of species in Europe that from the current body of knowledge cannot be distinguished by habitus… only few o…

There’s taxa where I go through and correct occasionally if I get bored but… I just don’t have the energy to argue with people, usually. For taxa that don’t have a ton of observations, its not too difficult to correct- there’s a few lesser-IDed taxa that I’m very confident with that I just set to no…

[image] spiphany: (among other reasons: because looking at old “needs ID” observations can be a rather thankless task) Well, I’m always thrilled when one of mine that has sat at Needs ID for a long time suddenly makes RG. How can we make the task feel less thankless?

I’ve always felt a bit guilty for doing that, but I often make a guess I know could very well be wrong because if I leave it at family/genus level it often stays there. I still would never deliberately misidentify anything but sometimes I’ll go with the CV if the suggestion seems to strongly resembl…

Do people actually get angry about being corrected? I’m curious how often that happens for people who do a lot of identification/especially specialized IDers.

Advice about "bold" initial IDs, as an observer and project admin

General

astra_the_dragon January 27, 2024, 4:50am 28

from time to time I get a comment thanking me, and that brightens my whole week ;)

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Advice about "bold" initial IDs, as an observer and project admin

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