Is there anything that can be done about organisms that are Unknown because their uploader opted out of Community Taxon? Is it a bug that they show up under Needs Id? (For example this one: Unknown (wild garlic) that cas4moss identified in the early hours of this morning, and came up as I was working through UK Needs ID just now.) If the uploader has been away longer than they were here (in my example, they joined at the end of April and were last seen in early August), I can’t expect them to ever come and see the community identifications.
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Just give it another ID and it will drop out of “Needs ID”.
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I first learned of that page from the old forum in the Google Group. The forums are a wealth of info.
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I don’t know if it’s “officially” stated anywhere, but:
- Chris is a curator & I trust him to know.
- I’ve seen it done many times, so it seems to be an accepted solution.
- It fits as evidence the human was present just as well as a track or scat does for an animal that is not pictured.
- It gets it out of unknown (not just by slapping any old label on it, but in a way that is both logical and defendable - see point 3).
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Not only does it get it out of unknown but because records of humans are hidden from basically all views unless you deliberately choose to search for them, it is as close of a tool to deleting them as we have.
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Plant mysteries intrigue me. I have a few minutes so I’ll see what I can do.
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Just saw your comment. Hooray, you got a lot of help solving the mystery.
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The huge benefit of iNat being international!
Our weed is a cherished herbal in its own home.
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Now there are around 313,000 unknowns! They are really getting sorted! Good work team :)
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Looks like I just joined the “unknown brigade”. I started with a search within my state of South Dakota, USA and right now there is only one unknown left which is due to the user having multiple observations (3 photos) that should be 3 different observations.
Now I am tackling Wyoming, USA and there are over a thousand there because of Yellowstone NP and the other nearby parks. Once I get those knocked out I will start working on other surrounding states.
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It’s usually possible to find some more “Unknowns” for any particular area if you go to Filters, remove the checkmark from Verifiable, and then click on the “leaf with question mark”/Unknown category. This brings up casual observations (i.e. those lacking a location or an observation date and those marked as “Captive/Cultivated”).
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Calling all caterpillar identifiers as you solve for unknowns, please help with caterpillar parasitoids (mostly weird looking cocoons braconids and tachinids). At times like these I wish I were a polyglot. I’m trying to include other parts of the world in addition to Eastern North America where I live. Thanks!
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/bus-passengers-parasitoids-on-caterpillars
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(oh, and we are at 260 000 unknown left! Numbers are decreasing fast!)
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What can we do for observations that have multiple photos for different species in one observation besides leaving a comment to split them up? It seems that most of the time these users have less than 10 observations and will not likely take action to break up the observation into multiple observations of different species. Not a fan of just leaving them in the system but I don’t see any way to bring it to a curator or staffs attention. The flag tool makes it seem like it is only for inappropriate/offensive purposes.
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There is really nothing to be gained by flagging them. There is no action curators can take to edit or delete them, beyond leaving a comment on the observation which you can just as quickly do yourself.
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Give multispecies records a Life label or common denominator label and mark “can’t improve” until some future time when a quality flag may be devoted to those.
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Got to finish them all off before the next City Nature Challenge when we’ll get a couple hundred thousand more!
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