Such guides may be welcome at Wikibooks instead.
This is interesting though…
This long thread ultimately points to the fact that the burden of the work is on the experienced IDers, and this will benefit mostly the observers (hopefully transforming them in IDers).
I sympathise with people who realistically highlight the many challenges that basically we are asking them to overcome, because it’s a substantial amount of work to do it well. And I admire those willing to push forward to one brick at a time.
Nonetheless, sitting (comfortably) in the side of then non-expert observers who have little knowledge to contribute but much to benefit from, I ask: is there any way that we could assist ?
(Let’s not make it another academia vs. layperson, amateurs vs. professionals thread?)
Caveat: some users have a ‘curator’ label displayed in their profile, not necessarily experts though. The website also emphasises metrics and rankings (‘leaderboard’, ‘top observers’, ‘identifications’ etc. - no opting out possible) across the board – on any observation, taxon page, user profile…
So… there’s already a sort of implicit, low-hanging hierarchy ready to be picked and interpreted in various ways. I find it hardly surprising if anyone would come to assume “top identifiers and curators = good at this or that = expertise”, because little goes in the way of softening such an assumption.
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Closer to topic, to build upon @astrebla’s comment: “armchair identifying” (no derision intended) is obviously made easier than ever by having myriads of books and pdfs and websites and hi-res pics to dig into. Nothing to belittle or chastise here, it’s both fun and beneficial to oneself and others. Still, despite highly-popular feature requests and a “be bold” motto, prospective identifiers of natural objects should imho be frequently reminded how there is unfortunately more to “identifying” than ingesting bazillions of photos, mastering copious literature, or following the bestest completest identification guide in the world (should it ever fall into their hands once generated by a clever algorithm).
Although not sufficient by itself, “Go touch some grass” is also key (
) advice, for even the scripture of (p)reference will routinely come short of the reality. Makes the need for exquisitely precise species descriptions or all-encompassing ID keys slightly less pressing.
Unless you have the capabilities to build a platform that everyone wants to use, I think the best way of contributing would just be to start identifying and building expertise. Anyone who observes a lot has probably noticed that some taxa get identified more readily than others. The reasons for that can be complicated; sometimes the latter are nearly impossible to identify from photos, sometimes it’s just a group of organisms that are less interesting to most people. Sometimes they’re identifiable but the resources are obscure and inaccessible and nobody on iNat has worked to produce alternatives yet. The amount of taxa that get less attention for these reasons is slowly declining, but there are so many species out there that there will always be some. At the same time the amount of observations is increasing to the extent that even taxa with a bit of attention have plenty of observations not getting it. Start with your own observations and try to figure out why they’re not identified. Look for resources for the taxon, tag top identifiers, and make guesses. Once you feel like you understand a bit, expand to similar observations in your area. Then whenever there is a good way to share ID info widely, you’ll be in a position to add to it.
The first item clearly doesn’t rule out the use of how-to’s. What it actually says is that articles should not “read like” a how-to - so it’s a stylistic recommendation, not an explicit prohibition. It then goes on to say that “describing to the reader how people or things use or do something is encyclopedic” and that “wording can easily be modified to avoid advising the reader” - which again emphasises the style, rather than the substance. More to the point, none of the contrary examples it gives are in any way equivalent to a dichotomous key, which clearly isn’t providing anything like advice, or personal instruction/guidance.
Species aren’t really natural kinds, and they cannot be accurately described without reference to other similar definitions within the same framework. The large majority of species descriptions must include some form of key or step-by-step analysis that explicitly defines how that organism differs from all others - otherwise the arbitrary labels we attached to them would mean nothing. A key describes what a biologist does in order to determine that an organism is this particular species - it’s a filtering algorithm based on scientific principles, not merely personal advice about some banal life-style choice.
I also don’t see how the eigth item would preclude detailed descriptions of how keys can be used to determine species. The issue of localisation is obviously pertinent, but there’s no reason why it should be seen as an insurmountable hurdle. Variation is a fundamental aspect of the natural world, and keys are an important tool that helps us deal with some of that messiness. Just because something has fuzzy boundaries doesn’t mean it can’t be described in an encyclopaedic way.
As someone who has written nearly 100 Wikipedia taxon articles, I can tell you the main reasons are:
- Wikipedia articles about animals or plants are supposed to follow the templates for those types of articles, and although those templates include sections for anatomy and morphology, they do not include sections for identification, diagnosis, keys, or similar content.
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a field guide. This is more or less covered in the “What Wikipedia is not” policy, which has already been discussed.
- Wikipedia content must be cited to reliable sources. A lot of knowledge about species identification is not published or very difficult to access.
Wow, thanks for that tip! I had no idea that was possible!
Links to ID keys would be awesome but such a huge job to pull off. Myself, I would love to see maybe a small icon overlaid on all species (or sometimes higher, of course) which are impossible to get to species with just standard photography or even macro. Where only good micrographs could possibly work. And maybe even another icon for those even more crazily difficult observations that can only be confirmed with genetic testing.
If these icons were included in the CV suggestion list, it might in effect, lower the correction workload for the IDers by encouraging more people to just be happy with higher than species choices when using a CV suggestion.
In what region and who would determine whether this applies (and where)? I suspect this would still have many of the same issues as creating identification keys for a global and international website. Even if the work involved in assigning a label to a taxon is less than writing a key, the knowledge required would not necessarily be substantially less.
Here in Australia we have a resource called “Atlas of Living Australia” https://www.ala.org.au/ which gives a brief description of every known organism that occurs in the country. On top of that it provides an extensive list of images from that species. Most of the recent images are obtained from iNaturalist observations. It is not a perfect system because some misidentified specimens appear in the image collection. The website invites users to notify when an incorrect image is identified. I am not sure if other countries have a similar database to this.
There is a feature request like that.
But ALA draws its species description from Wikipedia, much as iNat does.
This is true, but I find having a large catalogue of images to view definitely helps to make a call.
… and you write this as someone with zero iNat identifications.
There’s no principled reason why the templates can’t be adapted to present the information in different ways. But even without such changes, it seems perfectly acceptable for the summary or description to include some of information that is typically found in field guides or provided by keys. The Thymelicus lineola article I linked to earlier demonstrates this, and as do the articles for e.g. Pieris rapae, Polyommatus icarus, Boloria selene, and many, many others. These articles commonly cite field guides as reliable sources for the information, which often include keys. An encyclopaedia can summarise a lot of information from field guides, without becoming a field guide itself. As already pointed out above, the Wikipedia policy you linked to is primarily concerned with style, rather than substance.
This seems unintentionally ironic. According to the article about itself, Wikipedia “has been praised for enabling the democratization of knowledge”. This is a central theme of the topic of this thread. There’s a lot of information out there, but it’s either not easily discoverable or is difficult to access. Wikipedia is supposed to make such problems much easier for everyone to solve. The question is whether it could do more to help people with species identification without compromising any of its existing policies. It seems clear enough that it already can, so it’s hard to understand why there should be so much resistance to trying to improve matters even further.
You can add the information to this wikipedia article if it is missing, but it will only be available in the language you provided.
I did not find it in the comments, but https://www.inaturalist.org/guides are for this. For some reason alle observation websites are moving away from providing determination keys, so probably this is not the way to go…
So true. You can not publish your research on wikipedia, only refer to published work. Another observation website writes own articles and it there is none, refer to wikipedia.
Guides are no longer supported by iNat.
@bvanney I wish it could be so easy! Someone, with specific knowledge has to go into Wikipedia and write the descriptions. In many cases there’s not even a page yet. For organisms that have a page, there is considerable variation in what is presented - all depending on people who’ve written that. My deal is insects, for which there is largely no info unless it’s economically important in some way. Folks I’ve spoken with say writing/editing pages is really easy - but it’s not entirely obvious to me what the specific syntax of things has to be for citing references etc. You can’t just jump into the edit mode and write whatever ya want! Anyway, I get youer point, many times that bit about who described it when and what family it belongs to isn’t really the most essential information I want to see.
I think, for insects, there should be a link/connection to BugGuide for North American insects, as thre is often just the right info in there - I’ve written it for the beetles I work on.