Over the past week or so for over 500-ish observations, an identifier who claims to be a degreed ornithologists has been deliberately pushing research graded observations back to genus, family and even order without explanation and when he does, he just says “photo quality can’t make sufficient id”.…

I was wondering if this was going to come up in the forum so I’ll explain what I’ve been doing. I have absolutely no interest in anything other than civil conversation about these issues. To be clear @birdwhisperer and @sedgequeen , my degrees are real last time I checked. I asked for advice with thi…

I apologize. I was wrong. (The reported lack of responses was what led me to the error, well, that plus I was really grumpy that day for reasons having nothing to do with iNaturalist.)

My apologies as well. I didn’t realise (although I should have) that things were more complex than they seemed. Your replies to what you considered mis identifications were thorough and polite. I cannot comment on their correctness - I can hardly identify the birds in my region, good picture or not.…

What you wrote here makes a lot of sense. What you commented on the relevant posts at least wasn’t clear to the reader. Perhaps it would have been useful to write something like, “This bird is clearly a Song Sparrow, but I think that it can’t be identified as Merril’s Song Sparrow from the photo. …

This is just my opinion: @jmaley Any ID made with the belief in what you are identifying is a valid ID. There will be a lot that are “wrong”, because there are a lot of observers and identifiers that don’t have a good grasp of what is involved in making a “correct” ID… but they are making the IDs w…

[image] kiwifergus: If we are to EXPLICITLY DISAGREE WHEN WE SEE A LACK OF EVIDENCE , then the identification needs to have that “Joe disagrees it’s a fish” removed, because that starts the arguments. If, on the other hand, we are to ONLY EXPLICITLY DISAGREE WHEN WE SEE EVIDENCE IT IS NOT THAT S…

@kiwifergus thanks for your input but I couldn’t disagree more. I think the idea that there is no such thing as a correct identification is absurd and coddling. I believe that this encourages, or does nothing to discourage, seriously bad behavior. I think you overlooked one of my main points in the …

[image] jmaley: What I really can’t understand here is that anybody can join and identify tons of observations, many incorrectly, with little or no comment on the observations. But, I identify ~500 observations at a coarser scale based on the photo I’m looking at (I believe correctly) and I don’…

[image] jmaley: I’ve also heard the argument about the top priority of iNaturalist as connecting people to nature, but it is also a citizen science portal providing observations to one of the largest natural history observation databases in the world, so data quality should be of high interest t…

Can you report an identifier?

General

bouteloua November 1, 2019, 12:12am 32

From the iNat staff:

Topic		Replies	Views
Doesn't iNat commit a basic logical error when an identifier suggests a higher-order taxon? General	75	2007	August 14, 2023
Users disrupting species identifications General question	49	3579	October 21, 2023
Agreeing with experts and "research grade" General	117	14762	September 30, 2019
Misidentification, accountability, and bullying General question	69	6252	February 9, 2021
Disruptive disagreement on identifications General	48	1909	November 18, 2023

Can you report an identifier?

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