Rather than flagging individual items, if it’s an overarching problem with user behavior it might be best to contact help@inaturalist.org . Or, if suspected it’s just continual cultivated plants for spite, maybe just mark them as default (keystroke “x” in identify) as they come up.
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Happy to take a look at this situation privately if you want, just email help@inaturalist.org.
Tony
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I don’t disagree with you, but it’s the only way I know that is within the current TOS scope.
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I’m sure I’m not the only person who when dealing with unknowns helps with other problems people have. I have written a very detailed explaination of editing locations to help one observer, but I think it might help other people.
First get a single observation to the location and diameter you need - you haven’t managed it here yet, I’m afraid. Click “edit” in the blue box at the top right of the page. Zoom in on the map and use the white dots at the edge of the red circle to make it smaller. You can click and drag the red pin to change where the centre of the circle is. When you’ve got it to a place you like, look at the numbers above the map. Copy the lat(itude), lon(gitude) and accuracy numbers down. Click save observation at the bottom of the page, and that should be one observation sorted.
Go to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/[USERNAME] , and click on Batch Edit. Then select all the observations you’re putting to the location (in the yellow column on the left), and click “Edit Selected” at the top. Click the little arrow next to “Batch Operations” and then the little blue “edit” under the little globe picture. Put in the numbers from earlier for the lat, lon, and acc(uracy), and click “Apply” underneath. The numbers should be shown updated on all the observations below. Then click “Save all” at the bottom. All should be sorted!
You’d have to edit where I’ve put USERNAME, but I hope it comes in useful.
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I’m very new to iNaturalist and I was really happy to hear that narrowing down unknowns to a broad level is something helpful I can do! I work with primary school aged kids so I tend to have broad knowledge rather than in depth knowledge
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Even a coarse ID gets it out of Unknown!
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Hi everyone. I am new here. Interesting to see your thoughts on it, thanks.
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Welcome!
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Thanks. I think the user in question might be getting on the right track, finally. His most recent observation was marked as cultivated, so that’s progress. I’m “following” the user to see if he follows through on his antagonistic threats. He seems to be getting a bit nicer, though. I stopped identifying his observations, so as not to provoke him.
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I think that this topic is relevant here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/bulk-identification-tool/5029/28
If there was a bulk identification tool (with safety features that only allow bulk edits to Unknown records, and only down to Order level), then we could dramatically reduce the number of ‘Unknown’ records.
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I’ve often thought about this :)
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Thanks everyone for the warm greatings 
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That can easily lead to many click click wrong IDs. Better to look at each one first.
If you pick a section of the Unknowns you can whittle away at it. The low hanging fruit is easy - and some are lurking in Unknown because it is hard to tell if that smudge is dirt on the lens, or a bird? Never mind WHICH bird.
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I’m no longer working on ‘Unknowns’ but stuff stuck at Order level for insects. Most of the specialised experts on here search by Family to find things to ID and there seems to be a glut of observations stuck at Order.
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That’s great! anyone who helps push observations along towards species has my support :)
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True, there could be some wrong IDs, but that’s why I suggested a safety feature of only going down to Order level. That way someone who is looking more closely can easily fix the mistake, and it will not accidentally reach Research Grade. But it would still save a lot of time and help to get a lot more IDs closer to reality.
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I definitely endorse the recommendation to use some type of auto-replace to easily add an explanatory comment. I use TextExpander, but there are lots of others.
Those of us that work on IDs are almost always positively motivated, but when a new user sees that someone ID’s their photo as a “Flowering plant” they can easily jump to the wrong conclusion. No one has the time to patiently type out for every observation a friendly explanation of how high-level IDs accelerate precise IDs by others. So typing a four-character abbreviation that auto-expands into a detailed comment is a good fix that avoids pointless conflict.
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That would be nice. Currently I have some boilerplate and a link to the frequent response page in an unpublished iNat journal entry, so that I can open that separately and copy text to paste into comments, but it still feels inefficient.
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I am way late to this party but how do you set up a flag for ‘maverick’? I try to go through all my notifications and withdraw where I’ve made mistakes but I’m sure that I’ve missed many of them.
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https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?user_id=xxx&category=maverick
replace the xxx with your user name
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