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 donāt usually spend my iNaturalist time on Unknowns but you enticed me into it with this post, and itās 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 āiconic_taxa=unknown&captive=trueā which is all garden plants. Most of them are marked captive by someone other than the observer, so Iām trying to educate the observers about the distinction.
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Have been focusing more on personal life, and even when I ID Iāve 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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Thatās so good of you to do that! I know I should, but I find it really tedious 
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I feel a little annoyed by people whoāll mark a garden plant as captive but donāt even move it off Unknown, because I know that an observation ending up in casual doesnāt help it get identified. Youāre doing a really useful task, and hopefully (as youāre giving people responses) encouraging people to stay with the site and move onto wild observations.
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Thatās great to hear! I tell myself that Iāll eventually get to the captives after I finish the non-captives. ;)
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Youāll see me doing that now and over the next few months particularly for captives that are marked as place Private, as part of a certain cleanup Iām doing. I may or may not be able to get back to that set at the end depending on volume, so apologies there!
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I try to always ID them to at least ādicotsā or whatever if they are old observations, so theyāll at least pop up in searches of plants.
But if they are freshly added I generally just ignore them altogether unless I know the family or genus.
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Seems like youāre on a one-man mission to clear North America! or is it the world ;)
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Iāve also been welcoming new users a lot, since itās that back-to-school time of year when teachers have students make accounts. This year the local kids are learning from home so I get pictures of different garden plants rather than 35 images of the one tree outside the classroom door. (Itās a small pandemic silver lining but I will take it.)
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Certainly any IDing can get tedious. Iām professionally invested in the world of captive plants so I rather like them myself.
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I usually go global. Sometimes I feel bad that I keep seeing the same common Asian plants for instance, but I never find out what they are specifically. They just get a coarse label and eventually some experienced person will come by.
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Does anyone actually keep track of the numbers? The first link in the first post of this thread returns about 425,800 results.
A search for observations which have no ID at all (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=100&identified=false&place_id=any) never loads for me if place_id=any, although if I narrow it to North America, there are about 238,700.
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I think @lotteryd posts totals sometimes. I know Iāve seen a few people in this thread do so.
I used to just look at how many pages I got after filtering just unknown on the identify page as a kind of shorthand for how many unknowns there were.
It was seeing those page #s jump from 7K to 18K that made me need a break, though, so I try not to look there anymore, and do however many I feel up to IDing.
But yeah, I sometimes canāt get to page 100 by editing theURL, and other times could get to even higher page numbers (never 1000 or higher, though), so now I just try to start on page 5 or 10 of results and work backward or forward (depending on my mood) from there.
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I just looked at total numbers now, and they are at 431,215. So, if that first link is correct, they are staying pretty stable, which is an awesome effort!
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