Said “There are 459 replies with an estimated read time of 68 minutes!” I am going to read all these replies because I am so happy about this and I want to know what you think! 23/459!
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If you go to identify and iconic taxa unknown, on the bar on the side it says something like n observations reviewed - given that any observation that isn’t in unknown any more should come out of that list, it’s a reasonable judge of how many you’ve had to leave behind, although if someone else does know it and identifies it, the observation will move out of the list.
If you can’t see the number, you might need to click a button with two little arrows on it, on the right next to the top row of thumbnails.
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Oh, wow, I never noticed that you can click there! Thank you!
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Did not know about that side bar either.
Interestingly, to me anyway, there are 5,412 known unknowns - they have reached research grade. This includes viruses, bacteria, and cyanobacteria.
I’ve marked all the ‘known’ viruses etc as ‘reviewed’ by me. I guess you can’t really confirm whether something is a virus or particular bacteria without doing molecular work.
Sure, that could be an approach. In identifications, though, there does seem to be acceptable times when presentation is consistent with …
Scat, tracks, nests, pathological process, and etc.
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That is true.
Just cobbled together an umbrella project that attempts to collect together existing projects. The hopes are to increase diagnostics for the Unknownithologists of things unknown, odd, indistinguishable and otherwise makes one reflect “what the heck is that?” while at same time providing eye candy. Into The Great Unknown
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I see what you did there
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Speaking of projects for Unknownithologists (love the word), I recently started a differently-focused one for “reference observations”, although it’s just a stub right now (my IRL work has been crazy). Anyone is welcome to add helpful observations there!
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/life-s-mysteries-solved
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I had included this in the Great Unknown project but now I have left it off as it seemed to confuse things for me. I had meant this to be identified observations that represent many of the organisms that seemed to me to be left unknown or become State of matter Life. I do have the unknowns together with State of matter Life in a project un-cleverly called Unknowns and State of Matter. Within this, State of matter Life shows up as its own “species” …and a few ungrafteds show up from time to time (soon to become part of my exclusion list).
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The th is pronounced with the hard t sound - a Gaelic th
The word is in the Glossary (iNatForum)
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I am proposing UnknownIDologist
→ when pronounced there is the sound of an Ideology in it - thus crediting the work those little helpers as being associated with some kind philosophy
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There are under 200,000 now!! 
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Yep, they are coming down. According to the Unknowns and State of Matter project, which removes bacteria and virus from the mix, absolute unknowns are 170,605 plus 21,448 observations that are currently State of matter Life. (there are also a bunch of seemingly non grafted exclusions that show up as a species)
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Is it possible to get statistics on how amount of new unknowns uploaded changed with new additions in app and website?
Staff might know that, but I don’t think there’s a way for us to get the information ourselves.
there’s not really an efficient way for regular people to get this information, i think, other than by sampling for records and comparing observation create datetime vs datetime of the first id. (the datetimes should match if the observation was identified upon upload.)
That’s a pity, I hope it works at least in some cases.
I have gotten a couple rude responses. Someone actually said something like, “Well I know it’s a plant. You should have just left it as unknown if you couldn’t give a better ID than that.” 
There should be a mini guide/tutorial for new users that gives them the basics of how taxonomy works and why narrowing down the ID is helpful.
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