Well, it’s never late to learn.) With groups like Notuidae it’s not impossible, I suppose, it’s a better group than some micro moths. btw I check this website to see which moths we have in Moscovskaya Oblast’, the best is that the author is on iNat, not all photographers though. http://insectamo.ru/hete/98-hete/noctuidae/805-noctuidae-plusiinae-acontiinae-pantheinae-dilobinae-acronictinae
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Thank you for that!
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I’m not confident to jump much into the ID game, but I just started on some of the local Unknowns.I figure I can tell a spider or a bird. So, I’m okay providing a broad ID or using the Species Name suggestions to provide a reasonable suggestion. In that case, I copy/paste this comment. Feel free to offer instruction if this is not a good practice.
I’m not an expert, but this was Suggested by iNaturalist AI. Did you know if you click in the Species Name box when adding your Observation that iNaturlist software will suggest likely species? It’s not always right, so it’s worth checking further. The Compare button may offer similar suggestions
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That’s very much like what I’ve been doing, except I don’t use the Suggest tab unless I’m pretty close and just want confirmation. (Occasionally, especially if it’s not close to me geographically, I’ve learned that there are similar organisms I didn’t know about. So it’s back to genus or higher.) It’s very satisfying to see Unknowns become Research Grade because I gave them a nudge!
My boilerplate for IDing unknowns to vague levels is:
I am identifying this very generally in the hope that it will be noticed and identified by someone more expert.
I sometimes add additional comments if it’s warranted.
Sometimes you’ll find you need to use a Comment to ask what organism is meant to be identified: the tree, the bird on the branch, the lichen on the bark…
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A lot of my local fungi is starting to become familiar. Maybe I’ll try it out!
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The suggest ID tab can be used for any level of identification. There is no requirement to be ‘precise’, and it will often throw up identifications that may help you narrow it down.
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I just got my first such rude response, and I’m a little perplexed by it. I’ve been on iNat for 5 years now and never encountered such a thing.
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(after looking at the observations…) I suspect the person doesn’t fully understand the ‘outline’ structure of taxonomy. They are likely either thinking the name ‘dicots’ doesn’t sound right or they are clicking on ‘dicots’ and seeing some thumbnail that isn’t anything like what they posted. They also likely don’t realize that by not entering a name themselves, the observation displays as ‘unknown’ and we all strive to get observations at some level better than unknown. Explaining some of this by using some of the text people have supplied in this thread may help.
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Last week I got a message that the observation was about the tree and it’s not likely to be a dicot. 
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This does happen- with my frequent coarse id of “Magnoliopsida” I occasionally get comments like, “Wrong- I know that is not a magnolia.”
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These last two comments made me chuckle ( @lotteryd and @fffffffff ) but my own chuckling reminds me of my journey of learning since joining iNat.
I am not a complete slouch when it comes to science. I took biology in high school which was, admittedly, many many decades ago. I am familiar with Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species having had to memorize the sequence (and I still have to go through that list to remember which is one up from Family). I used keys to identify leaves and insects. I’ve been bird watching for almost 10 years and generally observing and loving nature for most of my life.
But I don’t understand a really large portion of what is on this site (iNat and forum). When we have discussions about what to photograph, I am immediately lost with the volume of scientific labels for parts of plants or insects that I would have to look up to figure out. And when I look them up, I can only find really detailed explanations with more scientific jargon I don’t understand. Frankly, I love nature but I’m not in it for the science. So I just gloss over what I don’t understand and enjoy the benefits of the site for how it helps me with my personal level of enjoying nature.
So when I chuckled at the ‘the tree was unlikely to be a dicot’ comment, it was because I knew that it was likely that tree was a dicot, especially since I figured melodi_96 would know if it wasn’t.
But I didn’t know what a dicot was 6 months ago. The first time I uploaded a photo with no identification and someone labeled it ‘dicot’, I had just enough left of that old biology class to take a moment and figure out that I was facing a new thing. A tree had a higher level taxon than ‘oak’ and, high enough up, that taxon was ‘dicot’.
We don’t know what we don’t know till we know it. And unfortunately, I think too many people, when confronted with something they don’t know will say ‘not true because it’s not in my personal repository of things I know to be true’.
Instead of thinking, ‘hmmm… why would they say that,’ they jump to declaring, ‘not so!’.
Some of that is benign behavior and can be ‘enlightened’. Like others here, I have quite a bit of experience in education and I taught kids who were behind and struggling to catch up. Helping them learn new things was never easy. But one doesn’t give up on the concept that they could learn. And I choose to at least start at the assumption that a particular response or behavior might be the result of someone missing a bit of knowledge that would change their response or behavior.
I think this is hardest to see when one is immersed in a peer group that is mostly at the same level and you folks are all wicked smart! But it may be hard for those of us that aren’t science majors to keep up with academic level conversations and expectations. This is not to say those conversations or expectations aren’t valid and valuable. They are. I don’t feel left out when I can’t participate. I’m just cautioning us all to realize that when we invite the public in, we may need to hold different levels of conversation in different circumstances. We all have the opportunity to teach here for all sorts of things. :-)
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Well, it’s all another theme about ho society pays for curiosity and its absence in a person. Two main things are school education and parental care, and nowadays it’s rare when not both of them fail with learning kids that learning is cool and repeating is too. Maybe you won’t use most of your knowledge about math from 10th grade, but who knows, if you have time it’s not a bad idea to learn something not new for you. With biology yes, you need to know a lot, but that’s what every theme is, it’s just that most of terms are not sed in everyday life while with some other subjects they are. And I suggest learning terminology, at least if you want to have your stuff ided, as we have great lack of iders and to save their time you have to start the id process by yourself and go as far as you can, and all keys do have a lot of words new to ordinary person, with insects they’re often different even between families. But in 21st century if you can’t remember all at least know how to google them (surprisingly many people can’t search for information at all, of any kind, it’s weird and better start with it).
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I feel your pain! After the first few months of being around all these cool plant observations and no idea what details the botanists were specifying in comments, I found a handy student-level glossary textbook for the plant parts.
Now after more exposure to cool insect observations too, I’ll have to be looking for something analogous but buggy before long. ;)
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Those - no it’s not - arguments about IDs occur at ALL levels of expertise on iNat.
Even what has been agreed by a group, can be upended by a scholar working on the taxonomy. What we know as A turns out to be G, or various species of X.
The ID is always open for the next round of discussion.
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Thanks for trying to help out with the user that sparked my interest in “rude” responses to coarse IDs. We’ll see what happens with that. It seems to me like the individual is just plain rude in general, and averse to assistance, but I hope I’m wrong. You had way more patience that I with the many paragraphs of helpful info you provided that should really be part of “onboarding.” I had no time for writing a manual on iNaturalist usage once I was done attempting to improve all of the data submitted by the user. I think, in the future, I’ll keep the “boilerplate” responses handy that I use during CNC for new users.
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yeah. I wouldn’t give that detailed of response very often. I used the boilerplate stuff a lot when I was identifying unknowns. I really thought some basic understanding would help but I was pretty dismayed at the response we got. You hung in longer and maintained patience after I checked out. In my mind, I just chalk it up to youth or personality and let them be. But we tried!
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I used to get that a lot too! :) I use angiosperm nowadays, but I still get the occasional comments that it doesn’t look like the thumbnail, or that they’ve never seen flowers on the plant so it can’t be in “Flowering Plants”.
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You can add a comment on each duplicate. Something like “this observation appears to be a duplicate of your observation at [link to original].”
That way both the observer and other users see your comment and know it is a duplicate. It’s not a violation of TOS so you can’t flag it and iNat doesn’t track abundance so that’s not an issue. The most you could argue is that it violates the “spirit of the law”, since every observation is supposed to represent a single interaction…and even then, only if everything is the same. If the photo is subtly different, or the observed time (not the uploaded time) is a minute later, that could be argued to be a new interaction.
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Hm, that sounds like not a way to deal with it at all, if it’s not written in TOS then it should be added, saying that 10 observations of the same thing with the same exact photos is ok definitely would lead to loos of some users, nobody wants to be a part of community where this is allowed. Now it seems that that behaviour is enouraged, users that left the site can’t do anything with duplicates, we can’t delete them weither, and a comment doesn’t change anything. And yes, comments are always added when duplicates are found.
I really can’t see why not add another type of vote, same as correct date and place.
Yeah, I’m still trying to see if I or others can help this user achieve…whatever it is they are attempting. I “followed” the user since they have now uploaded over 100 cultivated plants without labeling them as such. If he/she is unwilling to be assisted in learning how to check the “captive/cultivated” box, I’m going to have to start flagging the observations as intentionally misidentified, since the user did state that he/she intended to disregard our requests because they “think it’s funny.” I’d prefer to help the user figure out the site’s functions, but if they have absolutely no interest in that, I don’t know what else to do besides flagging, and attempt to correctly label the more obvious non-wild plants.
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