Hi all, Sorry, I’m sure this has been discussed extensively somewhere, but I’d like to get input on this question for myself. If I post an insect photo from an obscure family/taxa and I see that it has been identified to species by a recognized national or international expert on that family, is i…

This is a great question. And while I’m sure it has been discussed before it merits more discussion. I would wager that there are a significant number of research grade observations similar to what you describe. The issue here is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. On the side of speed, one c…

I think it’s definitely situational, and can be somewhat dependent on how many experts are reviewing a particular taxa. For leafhoppers and planthoppers for example, there are a few of us regularly identifying (and that includes making sure the research grade observations really belong where they’re…

Personally, no, I never do that. My identifications represent my own opinions, and I think blindly agreeing with experts just amplifies problems when the experts make mistakes. I don’t know why people get so hung up on making things “Research Grade.” I wish we’d just called it “Arbitrary Green Label…

I agree with @kueda . I want my IDs to represent my own knowledge/experience and not blind agreement. I will agree in situations where I IDed to genus conservatively but had a strong guess as to species and an expert confirms that or where I had my ID down to two species and one was confirmed. One o…

On the other hand, people can blindly agree with obs on the Identify page. It is not possible to see whether the identifier is an expert or whether the identifier provided explanatory notes. Yet it is one click for what is a very superficial agreement.

As someone who IDs a lot of taxa that no other expert might ever see, I always appreciate when the observer adds an agreement to make the ID research grade. Mostly, my goal is to add training data for the auto ID tool, which requires a lot of RG observations. The tool often performs quite poorly in …

If someone provides an ID for me in a group of animals I’m not very familiar with, I’ll often end up agreeing with it. But before doing so, I’ll do enough research to make sure the ID seems at least reasonably likely, typically by Googling the suggestion to learn more about the appearance of that sp…

The other angle here is at the current time if the expert deletes their account and no one else has added the ID it just vanishes and you lose the ID. Not just gets crossed off but actually vanished. This has happened at least once and means I’m more likely to agree with the expert if the ID looks r…

Does everything a user did get deleted if they delete their account - including their observations?

Agreeing with experts and "research grade"

General

jwidness May 30, 2019, 6:23pm 11

Have you seen https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/remove-agree-button-on-identify-thumbnails-in-certain-cases/3040?

Topic		Replies	Views
"When should I agree with somebody else's identification?" General	28	3873	October 4, 2020
Remove ability for observers to agree with IDs on their own observations Feature Requests declined	80	1667	August 6, 2024
Can you report an identifier? General	37	4405	November 1, 2019
"research level" not always reliable General taxonomy	61	3370	November 16, 2022
Issue with users automatically agreeing to an identification General	63	8530	June 15, 2019

Agreeing with experts and "research grade"

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