Even experts are not infallible. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to disagree with an ID made by someone with a PhD or apparent decades of knowledge in a certain field of study. More often than not it’s a case of thinking they ID’d correctly but had a misclick, or a case of sleepy eyes.
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I am someone who has occasionally made comments that came across more harshly than intended and seem to have been interpreted as “leave my observations alone, I only want experts to ID them”. I think it is probably a bit different from your situation, but perhaps it is helpful to have a perspective on why someone might respond less than enthusiastically to well-intentioned IDs.
On a few occasions I have gotten IDs from users who I had strong reason to suspect were relying heavily on the CV/comparing photos and didn’t have the knowledge or skill to confirm them – for example, because they were providing IDs for relatively obscure species across a wide variety of taxa and a broad geographic range (a bug in China, a wasp in Peru, a spider in Italy and so forth).
When these are observations of taxa that I know are tricky and there aren’t a lot of skilled IDers working on them, this is a behavior that can quickly start to negatively affect the quality of iNat’s data, so it is something that needs to be discouraged. I fear, however, that sometimes I have reacted a bit aggressively – that it has come across as an interrogation rather than a “please be careful” because my annoyance and frustration has outweighed the attempt at politeness. If the observation is of a difficult taxon, I may be uncertain about what it is, either because I don’t know how to ID it or because I don’t know whether I interpreted the key correctly. I therefore depend on people with more expertise than I have to help me. If it appears that the person providing the ID is just guessing, this doesn’t offer me any useful insight (if I wanted to guess or rely on the CV I could do so myself).
(This does not mean I think people should only ever give IDs they are completely certain about; I think there is a place for adding moderately speculative, intuitive broad IDs in cases where the observer had no idea what they saw, or where one has reason to suspect that the observation is something unusual – provided that one also indicates this uncertainty and does not present a guess as though it were knowledge.)
This has apparently come across as elitism, but the intention is not to suggest that only credentialled experts should ID observations. It is also not meant to suggest that there is no place to learn or make mistakes. Just that I’d prefer that people recognize their limitations when making IDs.
All that said, if I got an ID from someone who clearly does have a reasonable basis of knowledge about the taxa they are IDing and they are doing so conscientiously, I would normally have no issue with it. Sometimes there might be cases where I would really prefer to get confirmation from someone with additional specialized expertise (an especially tricky taxon or unusual observation or whatever), but I would probably go the route of tagging or messaging the expert in question rather than telling a user who is otherwise generally reliable to leave my observations alone.
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But you can tag someone. Leaving a tagging comment is not identifying.
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I blocked one user with whom we had an argument about IDs. They were, in my opinion, sometimes adding too bold IDs to their observations and as sometimes people don’t like others downgrading their IDs, and also there could have been a justification of these species IDs I simply didn’t know, I chose to talk to them in such cases and ask why they IDed the observation as species X. They felt offended with me countinuously asking, and in order not to escalate the conflict I chose blocking the account because filtering the observations each time, or paying attention to observer when IDing tens of observations at a time, would be too problematic. It’s upsetting as it is a good and active observer, and I don’t think I did anything wrong to them. But I decided that abandoning observation of this one user will be the best way not to escalate things and keep us both calm.
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For such cases it would help having a third function, something like ‘hiding’ (…from most of the User Interface, within some limits), that would be halfway between blocking (zero interaction, 3 users at most) and muting (only minor effects, unlimited).
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I just want to join the chorus of people thanking you for IDing plants. It took what I suspect was a very dear friend in real life recruiting plant IDers to get some of my observations to research grade. What was even more special about this effort is these wonderful and generous community members are teaching me to (slowly) learn to ID them myself and possibly even more important they are teaching me what I need to photograph to be helpful. I love photographing and learning plants, and I want you to know you are a treasured gift to many of us out there. Your skills are rare and hard to acquire.
With respect to this person, I can’t imagine a reason for the request that’s not out of line. I’ve had people who definitely did not know what they’re doing mis-ID observations and chose to delete the IDs (I know that’s controversial and have heard the community on that) rather than call out the people. I’ve also felt annoyance at having someone point out I’ m wrong. That annoyance + a little bit of time has turned into gratitude and sometimes corrected IDs. You can try to talk to them constructively or move on. It might also be worth taking a break and trying again later. I value courtesy and believe positive reinforcement and interactions are the only way to effect positive change. Having said that, this last year was AWFUL for me, and I know I’ve snapped on occasion. Just throwing out the “You don’t know what’s going on in their life” hypothesis.
But please know your skills are highly valued. We could certainly use your help in the Midwest if you feel comfortable generalizing a bit!
I do also want to say that I find that iNaturalist is full of people who choose a helpful, encouraging, welcoming, and respectful tone. Those are your people. There are lots of them here. Thank you, treasured plant person.
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Always willing to learn and help out!
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Maybe it could sound unpolite (but, at what extent, it depends on the way you have been told), but I think that it could be someone’s right to prefer experts’ identifications, at least for some taxa.
For example, I do not like identifications made relying on the CV, especially for hard-to-identify taxa. In certain cases wrong IDs made by the CV or by self-declared experts are really annoying.
For easy taxa I see no problems for non-experts to provide IDs.
In my opinoin, a different case is when other users are mmaking (many) mistakes with their OBs. In such cases corrections should be only welcome. In the case, try to explain why you are correcting their IDs.
I have had a few people ask me to not ID past a certain level for hard to ID species. I welcome that help. No one has asked me not to ID their observations. I doubt I would do it purely from a logistical perspective. When I do identifications one thing I rarely check is the user name. I check how many observations they have, the date, location etc. Those are things I need to check. I don’t need to know their user name. It would also be difficult to remember some user names in order to avoid them. FYI, most of my identifications are basic or ID’ing unknowns, not giving expert advice on species.
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I second this. I identify Chironomids globally. I dont have the memory to remember everybody from all around the world.
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I’ve had someone block me to prevent me from IDing their observations, after getting defensive when I ID’ed their Unknowns (I was ID’ing all Unknowns in my area with broad, order-level IDs for the most part, not particularly paying attention to usernames). They got upset because they didn’t understand the difference between the coarse IDs I was providing and the species-level IDs they later added to the observations, and thought I was wrong or disagreeing even though their more specific IDs were in agreement with mine. After a few days of this they expressed that they felt their iNaturalist observations amounted to a private, personal journal, and blocked me.
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For some of my obs, I’m pretty sure there are a couple of ‘identifiers’ who simply wait til somebody else has said something and then copy it. Can’t do much about that, and it often doesn’t matter - some sp that is pretty common. But in one case, I’ve ‘commented’ something like “This one is for research, and is important, so no guesses please” and my various identifiers have refrained. Thank you.
On the other hand, I’ve disagreed with an expert known as ‘Mister ’, and I was right.
Wish life was simple!
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Sigmund Freud weighing in here to say the person wanting you not to ID their precious observations is clearly displaying anal retentive behavior. As others have said, we don’t own our observations and that isn’t the point of making them. If you want to feel proud of your production (iNat obs) post it on Facebook or Instagram and go ahead brag about it, but don’t get possessive on iNat.
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I have been on all sides of this conflict. It is so helpful to read all these thoughts!
There are some whose suggested IDs over the years have been left without any supporting notes and unsupported by the photos. Sometimes these can take a great deal of time and energy to sort out. I made particular mistakes early on that I rarely make now, but it took a while to regain trust. I found that as my experience and reputation improved, I had this problem less often.
As an ethical matter, I ID without regard to the observer’s identity. Trying to look at the name of the observer before each ID was awful. But when a beloved NYC expert asked me not to ID his stuff, I had to try to find some solution with him. I think we have it now. Maybe I add an ID accidentally from time to time, but he knows my intent. And he is less likely to leave observations uncategorized for weeks.
I have used “marked reviewed” for an observer, since I can ignore it as needed in the future to see those observations. It only looks back in time, but it’s something.
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Just want to say thank you for all your IDs on my plant observations, it means a lot.
I’m also glad I’m not being singled out by the observer, sorry this is happening to you as well.
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Oh, I just had the one interaction with them (not ID related) when they were under stress. The hundreds of others were absolutely smooth.
Regards,
Patti Tessler
Interesting. The moderation team appears to have changed their view on this issue.
What makes you say that?
I remember when this issue blew up and the mods under no uncertain terms declared that anyone can block anyone for any reason if it makes them feel “safe” and that was the end of the discussion.
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I think you’re right that there is no discussion–when you want to block someone you just do it, no questions asked. (Or at least I assume so. I have never done it.) As far as I know there’s no requirement to fill out a form explaining your reasoning and then wait for some staff or moderator to approve the request*, so it’s odd for the Help page to go into detail about supposedly unacceptable reasons to block someone. I can imagine that blocking to “prevent identifications from people whose opinions you don’t trust” and blocking to “feel safe” are not always the same thing, but again, who is checking?
*okay maybe there is if you have used up your three blocks and have to request more