Yep. I guess what I feel the need/want for is annotating the observation photo, not the single organism definition that like @jakob, stands out to me in terms of general use and appropriateness…
I want people to search observations for both female rusty tussocks, and which observations include eggs, so I annotated both female AND egg (which is obviously not the same individual organism). Maybe I’m not using annotations correctly.
The observer does not get a notification, but the person who adds the annotation does. Which means everytime an ID, comment etc are added to a record to which I add an annotation, I get a notification, which can get overwhelming quickly
Gosh! I have never ever received a notification about an observation on which the only thing I’ve done is add annotation(s). I’ve never received any notifications from obs where I’ve added fields either. Only if I’ve also added a comment or ID, or explicitly followed an ob, do I get notifications.
No, you have to split the obs, separate one for adult and female, I asked some users to do the same when I was adding annotations to bugs, and many of them did, I see no problem in that action, while I see a big problem of a female egg.
Going through the Identify page seems like the best workaround for now. Using the keyboard shortcuts (including the arrow key for next!), you can get through them much faster than from the my observations page.
I guess we all agree that an observation tries to capture the presence of a species in space and time, thus the taxonomic focus of an observation is a single species/taxon (rather than multiple species shown in some photos) as long as iNat’s data model isn’t fundamentally changed.
What we’re discussing here are biological and other attributes associated with the taxon-location-date core, and this in my view should allow annotation with all attributes that can be gleaned from the presented evidence. I suggest to open Annotations (and Observation Fields where applicable) for mixed categories or multiple states, and an updated definition of what an observation is.
I agree that this doesn’t capture @muir’s observation adequately, but I don’t think that duplicating that observation is an efficient way to reflect what the observation shows: an adult (life stage) female (sex) moth laying eggs (life stage) at one location and date…
I second more options. As someone who occasionally posts land snails here, I wish ‘hermaphrodite’ would be one. Additionally, I’ve seen a few observations of intersex animals on this site too.
As we can’t show both in one obs. it’s the way we can show it, both observations have same date and location and photo shows both female and egss if someone is interested, plus maybe adding observaion fields to completely show what exactly is happening.
With a little patience there is no problem. Sometimes it is faster than others but that depends on how the network is. The problem is knowing if it is adult, juvenile, male or female. Whenever I know him I add him to the observation.
Perhaps the site owners should consider using a complete data sheet for each observation before accepting a “click and go” style. I’ll bet many users don’t even know the extra data is possible.
Come to think of it, other data like way down at the bottom of the observation page like date/time accurate I mostly have skipped or forgotten. It would be easier to do when uploading.
I do verify date, time, location of every observation in my photo editing software before uploading. So, actually I wish there was an easy way to hit yes for those points for hundreds of photos. I couldn’t find it in the batch edit tools, though.
M, you don’t need to vote for yes there without strong reason, they’re made mostly to add no, and if you’re not agree with that - vote yes to get obs from casual. Voting yes on every obs is a waste of time.
Pretty much the only time I’d vote yes is if someone else has voted no and I disagree. I have occasionally have voted yes to “Organism is wild” if it’s an observation of a wild organism of a species which is commonly captive/cultivated. For example this observation of Verbena bonariensis. I’m not sure if that’s a better approach that stating it’s growing wild in the description, it does have the advantage that it’ll be translated.
Edit - i should do both as if someone is using identify they can’t see that I’ve marked as wild without going to the data quality tab.