An addition to 'Automatic iNat suggestion for “unknown” observations that reach a certain age'

An addition to https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/automatic-inat-suggestion-for-unknown-observations-that-reach-a-certain-age/4242 that would be nice.

Another thing that would be nice to add/change at the same time, so that ancient observations that are moved from unknown to kingdom aren’t then ignored due to their age would be to use an aging parameter instead of observation entry date to order observations by default. Aging would be an invisible to user field that is set to current time whenever a change is made to the CID.

You can already sort by “most recently touched:” image, and taxon changes, IDs, etc. count as updating in this sense. Are you asking for this to be the default?

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I didn’t realize that. But yes, as a default would be better IMO.

This has already been submitted and rejected by the site as a feature request. They will not change the default sort order.

I would very strongly object to observations being moved from “unknown” to an automatically generated suggestion.

Where I work the automatic suggestions are often for organisms that are found on the other side of the world, not in this region.

It’s far better to leave them as “unknown” indefinitely than it is to assign a completely wrong ID.

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from what I understand, the suggestion is for the AI to assign kingdom level ID’s to observations that have been in the “unknown” category for longer than a certain period of time. If it is being suggested that the AI assigns whatever species ID comes up first, I would be against that as well

As @schoenitz points out, it is already possible to sort by oldest date updated via the Identify filters.

It is also possible to do this while Exploring observations by manually adding
&order_by=updated_at&order=asc to the URL.

Since as @cmcheatle points out the default sort order is not likely to be changed for the foreseeable future, I’m closing this topic to redirect discussion back to the previously referenced feature request, so we don’t fork the discussion and make it harder to follow.

Questions of how to define the “age” and taxonomic rank to which to confine any automatic IDs would best be addressed there.

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