Just came across a case where a user who isn’t the original observer and hasn’t been active in over two years has voted ‘fruiting’ on an observation that is clearly not even budding yet. The person who added the annotation also don’t have any IDs or observations of their own (or any other site activity at all that I can see), so I don’t think tagging them will accomplish anything. I downvoted the annotation, but the system will not let me add a proper ‘no evidence of flowering’ annotation, which is frustrating. It should be possible to add incompatible annotations when the other annotation is downvoted.
5 Likes
Is the observer still active? If so, they can remove an incorrect annotation, even if they were not the one to add it.
1 Like
It looks like they probably are, I’ll tag them and see if that works. Still think it should be possible to add the proper annotation if the original is outvoted.
7 Likes
For an observation on iNaturalist a viewer can choose to Id it however they best see fit, regardless of what ID others have made.
Why shouldn’t it be the same for annotations. By limiting ones choices because of someone else’s choices is denying everyone else the right to their own opinion.
Let everyone have their own opinion and let the numbers speak for themselves.
I doubt anyone doing serious research is going to blindly accept the information presented on iNaturalist or any other source.
2 Likes
I’m generally OK with this, but it might introduce unnecessary complexity to apply the same rules for annotations as for IDs. For example, I don’t see a need to require at least two votes for a particular annotation in the same way as we do for IDs. And I wonder how we would want iNat to present an observation that has two votes for Adult, one for Juvenile, three for Female and one for Male, for example.
I am not advocating for rules, just present the facts, no more no less.
The facts in this case would be “two votes for Adult, one for Juvenile, three for Female and one for Male”
That makes sense when looking at a single observation in the UI, but those annotations are used elsewhere, such as:
- To create the charts of Life Stage, Sex, Phenology, etc. on each taxon page.
- When filtering photos in the Photo Browser for a particular taxon.
- For the With Annotation and Without Annotation filters in the Identify dialog.
- For API queries (I think).
I think you and I both feel that iNat should allow conflicting annotations, so that people can better propose corrections. If so, then iNat does need an algorithm to determine what value (or values?) should be reported for each observation.
Right now, the UI doesn’t allow any conflicting annotations and uses a pro/con majority vote to determine if an annotation should be accepted. The feature request that I proposed advocates a simplified community consensus approach that would allow incorrect annotations to be fixed without making the process overly complex.
In my view, an observation with 3 (or more) votes for Female and 1 vote for Male should be reported as Female. One with 2 votes for Female and 1 vote for Male should not be reported as either sex.
3 Likes
I just discovered that you can agree or disagree with yourself on annotations?
I agree!
At least… sometimes.
Is there some tutorial on annotations? What are they meant to do and what is the preferred approach that users should take towards them? At this moment, I would not do annotations for others’ observations, because I don’t even know if that’s expected or even polite … Maybe I just missed it, but it is possible that the lack of focus on annotations is what causes people using them incorrectly and leads to the issues mentioned here that then require the changes - so maybe first it could be easier to educate us users?
I have done a post about how useful annotations can be here - https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/pillar-parade-s-afr/journal/68613-the-power-of-annotations
as mentioned above https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/apply-community-consensus-logic-to-annotations-in-the-same-way-as-for-ids/12075/18?u=karoopixie
2 Likes
There are now definitions for all the annotations here.
iNat staff indicated in yesterday’s forum post that there may be a little more guidance coming soon.
I’m guessing there will be a more concerted effort to encourage these annotations and standardize their use now that they are contributing to Phenobase.
1 Like
I agree, the annotation system should work the same way as the Id system.
1 Like