I deleted and redownloaded and it’s using the right observation ID for unknown obs now, looks like you fixed it. Thanks!
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I’m really concerned bulk action designs like described could run afoul of - or at least easily enable - violation of (good) iNaturalist policies regarding machine-generated content.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/machine_generated_content
Here’s some of the pertinent language: “It’s ok for humans to use machines as tools for arriving at their choice or to facilitate posting this content, as long as there is human involvement/oversight creating the content/decisions about each individual observation, identification, or comment.” (emphasis added).
Right now the extension is great - we’re specifically looking at each observation and then just using keyboard shortcuts. But setting something up to select multiple observations at once and then applying stuff to them… I don’t know.
From what I’ve read, iNaturalist has been pretty attentive/design-conscious regarding how to strike a balance between ease of work vs. the need to pay attention to each individual observation. @tiwane, do you have concerns?
I appreciate your concern, but used correctly it would be an amazing way to help shift the annotation backlog and, as for IDing, of course at a certain point someone needs to take a close look at the observation for a whole load of reasons, but at the same time, the tool could be an enormous help in preliminary sifting of unknowns at least to class or even order level to bring them to the attention of those best able to give them the attention they need.
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Oh for sure - I’m quite sympathetic! But if used incorrectly even by just one person it could cause a bunch of havoc that could be very difficult to fix, in part because of the breadth of what could be done, and the speed at which it could be done.
Conceptually, another thing to probably think about is the democratic nature of the iNaturalist project - all folks are more-or-less equal in the eyes of iNaturalist. A bulk-update, non-iNaturalist-developed extension that basically gives some folks superpowers…like I said, I don’t know.
This concept of bulk updates just seems at a minimum to be in a grey area of iNaturalist policy - it’d be good to have some Staff feedback, I think, before things get too far down the road, because if allowed it could definitely have huge impacts.
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It was the same with @jtklein 's id tool earlier. “With great power comes great responsibiity.” In practice, really only power users/responsible people used it, so it worked out. I bet it’s a similar self-selected group who will use this tool. (To try to limit it to power users, one way might be not to release it to the app stores, but keep it to manual install?)
If you relied on the filter criteria on the “identify” page when assembling obs for bulk edit, you could use the same filter criteria to issue a single notification for all the updates…
megachile added a comment to all observations that contained field=Nectar Plant whenever project=x.
megachile copied value from “Nectar Plant” to “Nectar / Pollen delivering plant” on all observations that contained field=Nectar Plant whenever project=x.
Might be hard to do because it’s like you almost need to re-interpret the filter criteria to construct the readable notification, but it would be kinda cool. Would eliminate redundant notifications.
On second thought, this would imply that they aren’t really looking at them before converting.
Again, I can’t make changes to the way the site handles notifications. If you use the tool to do something that generates 1000 notifications, then users are going to receive them and there’s no way for a browser extension to change that.
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Yes, I would think that doing something that generated 1000 notifications at once would probably run afoul of iNat’s rules against machine-generated content.
so does it then make sense for the tool to include a max limit on the number that can be done at once?
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As explained above, it is risky and against iNat policy to add IDs without checking observations carefully enough. Moreover, I think there is no high gain in producing many high rank IDs (kingdom, order, class). And even with superpowers it would take your time. An high rank ID doesn’t help that much (although iNat recommends observers to always put an ID on every observation posted).
These computer vision based phylogenetic projets are another solution for bringing observations, without ID or with high rank IDs, to the attention of identifiers with expertise in a specific taxon. (Considering this, I would even doubt it’s still usefull to add high rank IDs at all… provided identifiers are aware of the existence of these projects). @rogue_biologist @DianaStuder
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I’m primarily interested in observation fields so if taxon IDs are a primary concern I would be happy to exclude that action from the bulk flow.
I think this is a start but it may not make a big difference from the perspective of the user receiving notifications. If someone uses a 100 capped limit tool 10 times in a row it generates as many notifications as using it once with no limit. There’s an inevitable tradeoff between how easy it is to add info and how much activity users will be notified of.
I’m not particularly worried about bugging people with notifications; the concern that gives me pause about the volume is the possibility of irresponsible addition of inappropriate metadata. I plan to make the tool facilitate checking and confirming any data you add as much as possible, not overwrite data, etc, but ultimately it would always be possible to blow through that.
haven’t looked at the code… if the API supports bulk updates then it makes me think iNat should support the “single notification” idea. if the apis don’t support bulk updates then there may be performance concerns? having the filter criteria in the notification tells a set of users how the update could be undone and which data was impacted. sorry if i’m being a pain. maybe the extension mimics keystrokes some way and isn’t even using the APIs… if so then again… performance concerns?
iNat doesn’t have single notifications that summarize multiple notifications. There is extensive discussion of notifications elsewhere on the forum (and ways to improve - maybe sometime in the future). But currently, 1000 actions that can generate a notification will generate 1000*However many users are subscribed to each observation affected number of notifications. Even without the notifications issue, I would guess that 1000 actions committed at the same time repeatedly would be considered machine-generated content.
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Suggestion: button to sort alphabetically the configurations.
Thanks a lot for this great tool.
I prepared 7 configurations so far (none has the “Hide Button” checked):
After refreshing the “Identify” page (and clearing the cache), I get only 5 buttons:
For Africa I have about 4K Unknowns - where I could still catch Placeholder text before iNat destroys it with an ID of It’s Plant duh.
What I am afraid to begin to tackle is
African Plants above family 76K where iNat has kindly destroyed Placeholder text already. I chew away on that slowly using your phylogenetic projects.
Here I aim to catch that elusive Placeholder text Life in Africa Light at the end of that tunnel 
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Smart idea! If you wanted to take it a step further and get fancy you could purchase something like a Stream Deck that has customizable LCD buttons, but they’re a little pricey just to feel cool while doing iNat annotations/IDs ;)
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Just want to update and say that this tool has revolutionized annotation and ID for me, if anyone is on the fence, I say give it a try
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