I think that there are areas like insects and fungi that that have fewer rude responses than plants, so I’ve decided to continue adding coarse IDs there. Other than that, I’m going to work on moving forward IDs in areas I’d like to learn more about. Thanks for the kind words. And, @schizoform, no, not you!
6 Likes
Exactly ;)
I’m a fungus kind of guy, so my analogy is that most observations uploaded (70%+) are agaricomycetes and lecanoromycetes. There are some other oddball classes like dacrymycetes, leotiomycetes, neolectomycetes and tremellomycetes which I don’t often differentiate between, but just getting those 70%+ of observations out of the way really just makes the whole fungi list seem much more under control. I feel like a jelly fungi expert would be better able to contribute their expertise if they didn’t have ALL the other fungi getting in the way.
9 Likes
It may not be a bad idea to just cut and paste a quick comment along the lines of ‘initial ID to help experts find this observation to verify’ and put it in there. Even get one of the add-on’s for browsers that let you set up a quick code of a few letters that will then be auto-replaced with the full text of your choice.
Of course, there are if you so desire always plenty of other ‘jobs’ to keep one endlessly busy. Somewhere there is a thread on this forum that documents them, I just can’t find the appropriate search string to find it…
6 Likes
For those of you who have being doing this for a long time, I’ll just say that this thread led me to stick my toe in the water and add some identifications to a few unknowns myself. Only a couple were species-level… most were “spider” and other such general taxa.
10 Likes
Same thing here.
4 Likes
It all adds up :)
3 Likes
I did some unknowns in my state over the winter. I was moving ‘unknown’ observations to ‘insect’ that were up to a year or more old. When I did that, within a day or two, someone was able to come along and provide a finer observation. I actually determined it worked a little better to just go ‘insect’ rather than ‘beetle’. Why? I think the people that were working on insects were looking at the higher level obs first. They might move it to simply ‘beetle’ as I would have. But just as often they would get more specific - moving it to genus or even species level. Those obs I marked as ‘beetle’ didn’t seemed to be reviewed - or at least as quickly as those marked as ‘insect’.
I only got push back twice and both people were fine when I explained what I was doing. Ultimately, I’m sorry to say I got bored with it. There were so many that were from people who had uploaded less than 10 obs and seemed to have never returned to the site, or were more than one species in an obs, or photos of just a field or body of water, or basically joke photos. I figured I successfully moved perhaps 100-200 obs from unknown to some finer species (usually working in tandem with other more knowledgeable folks), but it was a lot of winnowing through stuff that wasn’t workable. But, winters are long here so perhaps I’ll have fresh patience next January!
All of this is to say (and I am exceedingly long-winded) - moving a obs from unknown to spider can be worth a lot.
12 Likes
It seems to be the start of the season (in the uk at least) of people going “my plant looks nothing like that” when I post an identification of flowering / vascular plants, and they can get a little abrupt or harsh. This is the piece I copy and paste after someone responds disagreeing in that way, partly using text from the Responses page.
Many people helping identify observations on iNaturalist will filter the observations by the group of species they know how to ID (like birds or plants). Putting in a general ID (as I did; there are 300,000 species under flowering plants) helps funnel your observation to someone who might know what they’re looking at so that it can get identified more quickly.
15 Likes
Two more insults in the last 24 hours, including Jhunior Morillo, a teaching assistant at City College of NY, who wrote, “You need to try a little more. Be more specific with the ID.” Ai yi yi.
5 Likes
Maybe he thinks you’re one of his students?
Perhaps reply with “I’m being this specific, because you couldn’t even be bothered being that specific”
[edit] But seriously, for the duration of covid lockdowns I would tend to just let it all slide :)
8 Likes
When I said I’d only gotten pushback a couple of times, one of them was what could have been interpreted as ‘sassy’. I chose not to interpret it that way and just explained what I was doing. I especially mentioned that by identifying it as a plant or fungus or insect… it was more likely to be routed to someone who specialized in those types of ids. The person came back with a perfectly respectful response.
It’s hard to interpret intentions with writing only and especially when we consider we often have no clue on age, culture, education, etc.
@kitbeard had a good snip of text for these circumstances and I’m betting it works more often then they don’t.
Of course, it’s possible that with the best of responses, someone just doesn’t play well with others. I use those cases to thicken my skin a little and move on to something else. :-) When people irritate me too much, I go outside naturing! lol.
13 Likes
I like this reply lol. Combats sass with sass without going overboard or being unreasonable.
All improvements are good improvements.
4 Likes
yeah… I do tend to talk myself into a lot of enemies… of course, we don’t know the motivation for the comments, which is kinda why I suggested that he might think we are his students, and there are any number of other reasons why he might have seemed unreasonable in his comment (and I use “he” when it could just as equally be “she”… ). I know I myself have stuff going on in my life that brings out the nasty me from time to time, and I’m very grateful for those that are patient with me and help me through that. I try to pay that forward, when I can remember to!
9 Likes
Relatable.
2 Likes
This is a difficult time for many people, but it may be worth reiterating some of the forum guidelines and the iNaturalist guidelines:
Remember to criticize ideas, not people .
Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone
Assume people mean well.
Be polite and respectful.
Avoid sarcasm with people you don’t know. Don’t assume everyone shares your sense of humor, or even knows whether or not you’re joking.
If there are issues with particular IDs/comments on iNat, please flag those and/or email help@inaturalist.org.
17 Likes
I generally just copy/paste the text directly from the iNaturslist help/FAQ, with a link to that anchor.
I feel like having the link adds the authority of something “official” to my response (I haven’t done an analysis; that’s just how I feel).
Sometimes I’ll add an additional follow up comment after that that says something like “added coarse ID to get through to a [field of study]ist.”
13 Likes
I’ve seen something similar happen already with a few of the unknowns I’ve dealt with. I’m convinced!
6 Likes
I’ve been working on the month of May with no particular year, location, or type of organism in mind. It sort of takes me on a whirlwind world tour every time I dip into it. I’m really glad to see the number of unknowns for May has gone down by thousands since I’ve started looking at it - due to all our cumulative efforts. There are still over 400 pages of May unknowns left, though… and as a new May approaches I’m wishing the pile were a little shorter…
12 Likes
I haven’t heard of doing that way before. I’ve been doing an ever expanding geographic region. Holding at state level at the moment.
5 Likes