There is at least one person well-known for asking people (and not asking nicely!) to stop adding IDs on unknowns. I don’t know if the situation has improved, but at least in years past it was causing identifiers to avoid the entire geographic region.
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OK, so how should people ID such observations if they should not ID as “life” and they have no idea what they are? Would my suggestion of using a sealife project for this purpose meet your needs as well as providing generalist IDers a way to get unknowns to specialists?
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Yes, there are currently about 60K observations in the Life pile, and about 560K in the Unknown (unlabeled even with Life) pile. I will continue to “agree to disagree” with anyone who objects, and continue to place observations in the smaller pile if that’s where I think they should be for now. My Life labeling is not random. It says a human besides the observer actually looked at the subject, and couldn’t figure it out for whatever reason.
Reminder: Outside of Random mode, we can only access the “front” 10K obs and the “back” 10K obs (depending on results sorting) on any database query that we make for identification.
I had thought about doing that myself, but the work of manually moving things in and out of a project is nontrivial at scale. Also, observers can and do choose to disallow moving their obs into projects they haven’t joined.
Ah, really? I’m unclear on how you are searching the larger just-Unknown pile (example) vs the just-Life pile (example) in a way that is much easier. Can you share your tips? Thanks if so!
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Recently iNat changed.
We now have an insistent red frame - you forgot to add an ID, with ‘plant or animal is just fine’
One CNC observer used ‘a’ as a placeholder to get around that.
If the observer does not know ‘what it is’ then better to leave it Unknown …
@blue_lotus there is a yellow label project for Porifera
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/unknown-porifera
but only 265 obs there - perhaps you can help some of them?
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Literally pick something at random. Fungus. Plant. Even at kingdom level it’s more likely to get ID’d than if it’s put at “Life”. Like I said, “Life” is almost impossible to search for outside of the sub-par Indentify tool, which I actively avoid. Observations with no ID can be found easily with normal searches.
If people could separate things based on whether or not they’re in the ocean, that would be amazing. Unfortunately, iNaturalist still has a severe bias against oceanic observations, so they have to be gone through one by one by actual human identfiers.
You can’t even do that once you ID something as “Life” because it instantly becomes inaccessible outside of the Identify tool unless you randomly run into it, which is highly unlikely. That’s the problem with this one specific taxonomic group. There is no possible way to do a normal search and restrict the results just to observations labeled as “Life”. It will literally bring up every single observation on the site with any ID.
Searching observations without any ID is quite easy actually. The simplest way is to just enter: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?identified=false. After that you can do anything you would do with any other search. You can’t do this in any way if the ID is stuck at “Life” outside of the Identify tab, then you have to use something like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?exact_taxon_id=48460 then deal with the Identify tool’s shoddy interface, in which you can’t look at or select a region on a map (you can only textually input user made regions (which is a whole other problem)) or do other basic stuff like Ctrl + click the image to just open a bunch of tabs (you have to select the text of the ID, which is smaller). It also offers far fewer observations per page, so in addition to the poor interface, it also takes about 10x longer to use.
Unfortunately, the history of users refusing to enter an ID as simple as plant or animal is just pure laziness, not truly unknown. I’m pretty sure even the least environmentally conscious user knows the difference between their grandmother’s houseplant and a bird they saw outside. Something like 80% of unknowns are just common plants in people’s yards. I am glad to hear something has been implemented, but users should not be allowed to just go around it by inputting random text. The unknown category should remain only for those observations that are truly unknown - blurry images of pond scum, slime molds, lichens, that sort of thing. Not the Red Oak in your front yard.
I’ll check it out.
You don’t actually have to enter any text–you can just click “continue” on the pop-up warning and it will let you proceed without entering anything. Additionally I’d like to note this pop-up is not new; the red outline on the blank observations is new, but the pop-up has been there for years.
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Please assume others mean well, and don’t cast aspersions on them. There are many reasons someone might not add an initial ID, and I think “laziness” is almost certainly not any of the main ones. Most people don’t know they should add an initial ID, and many people can’t get one at first because they have no internet connection when making their observation.
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@tiwane while you’re here, can you offer whether admins have a preference as to whether “unknown sea things” should be left unlabeled, to be searched for by specialists using identified=false as blue_lotus does, or turned to Life instead? (I balk at the “Literally pick something at random. Fungus. Plant.” tip though). Thanks for advice!
Meanwhile blue_lotus I’ve been @ 'ing you on likely ones today that are already at Life as I encounter them in my own search requests, so that you can find them after all. Let me know if you want that to continue or not, thanks!
You can tag me, people do it all the time. I’m not going to see them otherwise.
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Users might not recognize “Continue” as “Upload anyway.” It is ambiguous enough that – especially if they miss seeing the “Go back” blending in with the background – they might think that “Continue” is a way to let them fix the error.
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Indeed. The more popular citizen science site in South Korea is Naturing, where the system only recognizes species-level taxonomic labels and not including an ID at upload generates the text “Please help me identify this”. I’ve noticed Naturing users who have joined iNaturalist and repeatedly upload observations as unknowns since that’s the process/system they learned first.
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I just identified an obvious plant with the name in the image, with a full paragraphs long conversation between two posters about which exact species in the genus it was with a third separate observer that uploaded the image. None of them bothered to ID the image whatsoever. It remained at “unknown” status until I selected the indicated genus.
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