Amount of "Unknown" records is decreasing

Yes the description shows up!

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Thank you. That’s good.

Oh because having them lost in the rubbish of the unknown bin is so much better! ;)

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It’s not the iNat app. Though the description does appear. It lets you ID to Plantae/Animalia/Fungi with a swipe.
I am happy to give details in a private message, because it’s a bit TOO efficient for me to want just anyone to use it. It lets me go through nearly 100 observations a minute.

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Thanks, but that wasn’t what I was getting at. I just wondered why there seemed to be more instances of State of Matter Life observations lately with (1) a specified organism in the Description section, and (2) one identification by someone else of a different organism (both being in the photos). Since it takes three identifiers to get the community taxon back to the one specified by the observer, I was just trying to understand whether the Description sections are missing on the apps, and the answer above is that they are not missing.

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Just a FYI. I have just updated the State of matter Life cleanup numbers. There has been an increase in instances in all taxons that were being offered up.

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Sometimes it’s tempting to answer “No” to “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?”, just to get rid of it.

Picture of a bird on a moss, other people ID the bird, then the observer intends to ID the blurred moss.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/50638393

How many people will waste time reviewing this observation (attempting to solve the “State of matter Life” status)?

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In that case the observer originally IDed it as a bird (with CV, so it could have been a mistake), so that’s where much of the confusion came in. As for how many people…however many it takes to get to 2/3 community ID.
Whether it’s “wasted time” or not is up to the individual identifiers. Some of us don’t mind spending our time on observations like your example. Others do. For those of us who don’t mind, it’s not wasted time.

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OK, I understand.

Better asking the observer in such a case.

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Oh, absolutely!
Asking the observer is always helpful, especially when they change their ID.

E.g. 1: the changed ID represents a change in the focus of the observation, per the observer
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/5346910

E.g. 2: the changed ID does not represent a change in the focus of the observation, per the observer
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/37228303
image


Of course, there are also ones who don’t respond, and then you just have to assume the ID itself is indicative of the intent of the observation’s focus.

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Number of Unknowns for India is shooting up - for the happy reason that a lot of high quality observations are being added, by a user who is more focused on adding historical observations than on identifying them. If you feel like doing some coarse id, there are some lovely images to feast your eyes on in https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6681&subview=table&iconic_taxa=unknown

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Thanks @lera, it is very satisfying to look through those Unknowns in India photos and add coarse IDs, since the pictures are so good. I don’t usually spend my iNaturalist time on Unknowns but you enticed me into it with this post, and it’s enjoyable.

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I already ended up favoriting some of them just to admire the sculptural forms of the organisms, thanks @lera for the pointer!

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I saw some amazing slug caterpillars. So rewarding!

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Just wondering how everyone was going :) I see the numbers are creeping back up again, but maybe we can catch up again quickly when the Northern Hemisphere winter comes along?

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Myself, I am doing my local “iconic_taxa=unknown&captive=true” which is all garden plants. Most of them are marked captive by someone other than the observer, so I’m trying to educate the observers about the distinction.

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Have been focusing more on personal life, and even when I ID I’ve been working by species and not with Unknowns.

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Your personal life is very important to focus on too! If you can work on species that is awesome, because not everyone can do that.

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That’s so good of you to do that! I know I should, but I find it really tedious :confused:

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I feel a little annoyed by people who’ll mark a garden plant as captive but don’t even move it off Unknown, because I know that an observation ending up in casual doesn’t help it get identified. You’re doing a really useful task, and hopefully (as you’re giving people responses) encouraging people to stay with the site and move onto wild observations.

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