There seems to be a lot of nooks and crannies in this place.
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It never hurts to explore and know your habitat ;)
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The ādate updatedā view really gives a sense of momentum on some of the tough ones!
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Nice job everyone! Decreasing the number of unknowns seems like a fun activity that can be done by anyone (classes, students, kids, retired folks, people with a lot of time on their hands!, etc.).
Out of 30,113,464 iNat observations right now, it looks like there are 416310 unknowns, so about 1.38% of the observations.
There seems to be a lot of captive/cultivated pictures, especially of plants. Do you just click on that cultivated tab, and it then turns into a casual record?
Iāve recently been focusing on the unknowns from the new accounts, using the account creation tab:
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Yes, you have it right! Later someone can pull up the not-wild records as a subset in the Casual pile and look at labeling them, but for now you can tuck those out of the way.
And wow, that total number marks around ~10% decrease in Unknowns since the start of this thread. So folks have been pretty busy!
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This is a fun one! Unfortunately, there are no finds in my area in the last week. :(
Time to broaden my horizons ?
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You can change the number in the URL from 1w to, say, 4w to see a bit further into the past :)
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Welcome to the forum! :)
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Yes! When I ran out of Unknowns in Israel, I went through Palestineā¦ when I ran out of those, I started on the whole Middle Eastā¦
The mix of what you find in the Unknowns varies a lot by place. So try somewhere new, with new and strange stuff!
Alternatively, you can focus on further categorizing obs sorted to Kingdom into Phyla, Class, Order etc.
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I follow all of the unknowns I ID so I can learn what they are, as most of them I only have a course ID, and because how the system works interests me. Plus I like to read any comments and questions from newer users in case I can help them out. The number of notifications can get difficult and I have lost them all several times by clicking on the wrong thing. I wish they could be saved so you didnāt have to go through all of them at once.
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I do unknowns for Canada until there arenāt any I can ID at any level - which actually hasnāt happened yet, but it is the goal. I sometimes do North America but this is a LOT of observations and a lot of Robins, dandelions and dogs. At some point typing in āspiderā or ābeetleā again becomes something you just canāt do one more time - at least for that day. I suggest you find a system that works for you and do that.
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As @juliereid suggested, I also recommend starting āsmallā. When I first began, I tried to identify moths from all over North America and even some from other parts of the world. I think after a lot of misidentifications, I decided to focus on Noctuidae of Canada. I got myself back into moth ID mode (itās been a long time), learned a lot of stuff and got to know the major collectors. A lot of the intricacies of the website I still donāt know, but my system suits me, soā¦Good luck!
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For those working on the old unknowns and āState of matter - Lifeā categories, what do you do when you run across a record that someone has noted as a duplicate? I know weāre encouraged not to add IDs for duplicates and ideally the uploader should delete them, but many of these are from users who have been inactive for months. Is there a way to flag these? Eg. leave it as Unknown and tick the āID canāt be improvedā box? Or should we ignore/click āmark as reviewedā and move on?
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I asked something similar a while back on this thread:
Stopping observations showing up in identify
Flagging then was suggested (though thatās not really supposed to be used for that). Iāve also marked them as āno evidence of organismā on the basis that the observation doesnāt provide evidence of am organism which isnāt already on iNaturalist. I donāt really like that either but is seems less messy than a flag and other people can view against me.
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I donāt like to do it either, but mark the identical duplicate as āno evidence of organismā and mentally read it to myself as āno additional evidence of organismā.
That said, I try to do that only for identical copies of the photo. Sometimes viewers ahead of me have commented that it is a duplicate. I try to check on that and if itās nonidentical, the alternate angle could be useful to someone so I id it normally āpending later mergeā.
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Thanks fr the answers! lotteryd, good call to check on the duplicates before taking action. I could also see it happening that the observer deleted the other observation, so the one remaining is actually not a duplicate.
Iāll double-check in future and then use āno evidence of organismā for those that are duplicates. Iām reluctant to use āflag as inappropriateā since I imagine that the people who deal with āinappropriateā observations may not have a way to deal with duplicates. Unless it gets confirmed that this is how iNat would prefer us to handle it.
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Please everyone, do not be tempted to hit the x hot key for anything not actually cultivated. When I review cultivated plants I get very annoyed changing all the incorect ācultivatedā flags to āno evidence of organismā on photos of rocks and ketchup packets.
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Keep in mind that the ketchup packet you site as no evidence of an organism actually is evidence, that organism being human, since that is how both actual humans and human made objects are to be identified.
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Huh. I donāt remember reading that, but I will have to look at the guidelines again.
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