Amount of "Unknown" records is decreasing

Yes! When I ran out of Unknowns in Israel, I went through Palestine… when I ran out of those, I started on the whole Middle East…
The mix of what you find in the Unknowns varies a lot by place. So try somewhere new, with new and strange stuff!
Alternatively, you can focus on further categorizing obs sorted to Kingdom into Phyla, Class, Order etc.

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I follow all of the unknowns I ID so I can learn what they are, as most of them I only have a course ID, and because how the system works interests me. Plus I like to read any comments and questions from newer users in case I can help them out. The number of notifications can get difficult and I have lost them all several times by clicking on the wrong thing. I wish they could be saved so you didn’t have to go through all of them at once.

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I do unknowns for Canada until there aren’t any I can ID at any level - which actually hasn’t happened yet, but it is the goal. I sometimes do North America but this is a LOT of observations and a lot of Robins, dandelions and dogs. At some point typing in “spider” or “beetle” again becomes something you just can’t do one more time - at least for that day. I suggest you find a system that works for you and do that.

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As @juliereid suggested, I also recommend starting ‘small’. When I first began, I tried to identify moths from all over North America and even some from other parts of the world. I think after a lot of misidentifications, I decided to focus on Noctuidae of Canada. I got myself back into moth ID mode (it’s been a long time), learned a lot of stuff and got to know the major collectors. A lot of the intricacies of the website I still don’t know, but my system suits me, so…Good luck!

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For those working on the old unknowns and “State of matter - Life” categories, what do you do when you run across a record that someone has noted as a duplicate? I know we’re encouraged not to add IDs for duplicates and ideally the uploader should delete them, but many of these are from users who have been inactive for months. Is there a way to flag these? Eg. leave it as Unknown and tick the “ID can’t be improved” box? Or should we ignore/click “mark as reviewed” and move on?

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I asked something similar a while back on this thread:
Stopping observations showing up in identify

Flagging then was suggested (though that’s not really supposed to be used for that). I’ve also marked them as “no evidence of organism” on the basis that the observation doesn’t provide evidence of am organism which isn’t already on iNaturalist. I don’t really like that either but is seems less messy than a flag and other people can view against me.

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I don’t like to do it either, but mark the identical duplicate as “no evidence of organism” and mentally read it to myself as “no additional evidence of organism”.

That said, I try to do that only for identical copies of the photo. Sometimes viewers ahead of me have commented that it is a duplicate. I try to check on that and if it’s nonidentical, the alternate angle could be useful to someone so I id it normally “pending later merge”.

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Thanks fr the answers! lotteryd, good call to check on the duplicates before taking action. I could also see it happening that the observer deleted the other observation, so the one remaining is actually not a duplicate.

I’ll double-check in future and then use “no evidence of organism” for those that are duplicates. I’m reluctant to use “flag as inappropriate” since I imagine that the people who deal with “inappropriate” observations may not have a way to deal with duplicates. Unless it gets confirmed that this is how iNat would prefer us to handle it.

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Please everyone, do not be tempted to hit the x hot key for anything not actually cultivated. When I review cultivated plants I get very annoyed changing all the incorect “cultivated” flags to “no evidence of organism” on photos of rocks and ketchup packets.

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Keep in mind that the ketchup packet you site as no evidence of an organism actually is evidence, that organism being human, since that is how both actual humans and human made objects are to be identified.

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Huh. I don’t remember reading that, but I will have to look at the guidelines again.

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Is there anything that can be done about organisms that are Unknown because their uploader opted out of Community Taxon? Is it a bug that they show up under Needs Id? (For example this one: Unknown (wild garlic) that cas4moss identified in the early hours of this morning, and came up as I was working through UK Needs ID just now.) If the uploader has been away longer than they were here (in my example, they joined at the end of April and were last seen in early August), I can’t expect them to ever come and see the community identifications.

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Just give it another ID and it will drop out of “Needs ID”.

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I first learned of that page from the old forum in the Google Group. The forums are a wealth of info.

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I don’t know if it’s “officially” stated anywhere, but:

  1. Chris is a curator & I trust him to know.
  2. I’ve seen it done many times, so it seems to be an accepted solution.
  3. It fits as evidence the human was present just as well as a track or scat does for an animal that is not pictured.
  4. It gets it out of unknown (not just by slapping any old label on it, but in a way that is both logical and defendable - see point 3).
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Not only does it get it out of unknown but because records of humans are hidden from basically all views unless you deliberately choose to search for them, it is as close of a tool to deleting them as we have.

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Plant mysteries intrigue me. I have a few minutes so I’ll see what I can do.

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One mystery coming up
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/37424455

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Just saw your comment. Hooray, you got a lot of help solving the mystery.

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The huge benefit of iNat being international!

Our weed is a cherished herbal in its own home.

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