Interesting to hear the perspectives of my fellow identifiers.
Personally, I have mixed feelings.
I spend a lot of time in Unknowns where this change has no effect. So no comments on that specifically.
But I also spend a lot of time identifying more difficult taxa. As others have said, I’m looking for the occasional mistake but may as well add an ID to confirm a correct CID.
I usually find there are two types of observations I come across in an identifying session-- those that are obvious to me, and those that require careful thought.
For the obvious ones, I only have to take a few seconds. Removing the Agree button by default is a good idea in my eyes, but removing the ability to quickly confirm an ID easily doubles the time these IDs take. Sure, I could just mark reviewed and move on, but in many cases there are only two IDs, one by a specialist and one from a novice user (auto-agreeing or else using AI suggestion) and adding my ID really does make a difference in showing that someone knowledgeable is verifying the observations. But for many taxa, adding the third or fourth ID is pretty pointless in my opinion.
For the slower ones, it usually takes between two and fifteen minutes. For now, if it takes me longer, I skip it and cone back later when I have studied the taxon some more. Adding five seconds to type in the taxon name in this case is no big deal.
I would argue that most expert identifiers should be focusing on these sorts of IDs – ones that are not easy. Take a bit of time to tutor or create resources for new users and let them take on the easy ones.
The only big problem with this is that there is no way to filter by observations that are difficult to ID, only by taxa that are difficult.
edit:
In short:
if the taxa you are identifying consistently only take three seconds to confirm, maybe you should spend your time on something else.
BUT for the sake of reviewing taxa of mixed difficulty, the ability to quickly agree should absolutely be preserved.
When it comes to really difficult taxa, the extra few seconds makes no difference.
Please remember some of your users live in rural, less connected parts of the world. On bad days with our internet, I can fill in a few letters in the search box, then wait (go off make a cup of tea) while the drop-down appears (if it doesn’t time out) before I can click on the relevant taxon. With the agree button, once I have clicked, I can leave the tab open and move onto a new identification, which has been slowly loading in the background. “little” is rather subjective.
That is unfortunate, of course. But I still do not get why should you add 3rd or 4th ID to the RG observation which is, in your opinion, correct. Even with the Agree button, it is still seems waste of time.
I do not support this change. I understand why it was made, but I think it discourages participation, and thereby reduces the possibility of education on conservation and environmental issues. I thought (and by reading other posts I found I must have been ignorant of the purpose of IDs) that the idea was not just to track what species occur where, but to encourage people to virtually “explore” this natural world. Agreeing with observations made that exploration interactive. By making iNat as interactive as possible - and face it, searching through and identifying observations is also fun and an enjoyable pasttime - iNat encourages people to search through observations and thereby learn more about nature, and perhaps thereby more aware of the need for conservation.
I’m also curious the impact upon projects. Perhaps I’m again ignorant of the “true purpose” of projects and indentifications, but I created the Okefenokee Photography Project because I want to highlight this beautiful National Wildlife Refuge. I want people to come to the project, make id’s, and be aware what animals and plants live in the swamp. That way, if those beloved species are ever threatened, as they can be (see https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/okefenokee-national-wildlife-refuge/journal/35780-okefenokee-mining-proposal-hearing-frustrates-participants) they will have built an appreciation and possibly participate in the political realm to protect it. Now, since I often quickly ID observations that occur in the Okefenokee NWR, other people will be discouraged from coming to those observations since they are already “research grade” and there “no point” in adding an agreeing idenfification.
I feel the removal of the agree button discourages participation, will decrease the amount of people that “virtually explore” our natural world, and will have much bigger negative ramifications on conservation (just because people are annoyed by leaderboard hounds???) I think we should encourage people to participate in as many ways as possible. Even if they can’t outdoors to explore, they are becoming more aware of our planet through virtual exploration, and that should be encouraged. (And I don’t even get into the huge numbers of observations that are “research grade” based upon 1 supporting ID, but are actually incorrect.) Thanks! William
See my post below. I think there is value in adding a 3rd or 4th ID. It is a way for people to explore observations and learn more about our natural world. The agreeing IDs are a way to track your explorations (yes, I suppose you could hit “reviewed” as opposed to “agree”). Plus, there are so many incorrect research grade observations based upon 1 ID. Yesterday I saw a “research grade” Little Blue Heron that was actually a Great Blue Heron. Removing this feature discourages searching observations that are already research grade and could thereby cut down review of incorrectly identified observations.
This doesn’t seem like a logical conclusion. If the site wants to encourage more Improving IDs, that implies more Supporting IDs are required as well. A Leading ID needs some Supporting IDs before it can become an Improving ID. More to the point, to be genuinely improving, it needs genuine support - not just auto-agreement without due consideration. The big problem for iNat is how to distinguish the former from the latter.
How would it discourage? I check all unreviewed observations (time allowing), except that I do not add ‘agree’ if they are correct. i do not see any value in adding my 50 cents there. I do not care about the numbers of IDs I do,only about correctness of the IDs.Ithink, this should be the aim of the IDers. Again, education comes with correct IDs and comments, not by the number of IDs.
I was interested in getting an idea of how folks as a group are reacting to this change, so I calculated some basic summary stats on the commenters on the post announcing the change. Current as of about 7 am EST 7/19/20. I used this post rather than the forum because a lot of folks aren’t on the forum, and many people posting on the main page post are also here in the forum.
For each poster, I went through and determined whether they expressed support for the change, were opposed to the change, or either didn’t express a clear opinion or commented on something else (like the formatting changes for text, which have gotten a little lost in all of this). Most cases were pretty clear on whether for/against, but I did have to make a few judgment calls. I also pulled the # of observations, IDs, and curator status of each poster and calculated a ratio of Obs/IDs for each poster:
Agree Change
Total N
Curator N
Curator %
Mean Obs
Mean ID
Mean O/I Ratio
Pro
11
5
0.45
8129
21410
0.62
Against
42
15
0.36
11670
57722
0.54
I think that there are a couple things that stick out to me. The most obvious is that about 80% of posters that express a strong opinion are against the change. Another is that, while those against the change on average do both more observing and more IDing, they do comparatively more IDing than observing. This is also represented in the lower mean O/I ratio for this group. There’s been discussion before on the forum about how some folks differ in whether they focus more on observing or IDing, and this result may hint at a difference of opinion along those lines, with the more ID-focused users more strongly opposing this change. Users against the change also average 270% of the IDs of those for the change, a pretty large difference. Taken together, these results would make sense, as the activity of high volume IDers and more ID-focused users are more directly impacted by the change.
Then your purpose is very different to mine. I not only provide expert confirmation of identifications (as the only person who has worked on my taxa in the past years), which many people value and often tag me to confirm identifications, but I also require expert confirmation of my observations by knowledgeable people in the field. Not all identifications are the same. “Research grade” is not the same as an authoritative identification.
So, I’m late to the controversy (as usual) and probably missing something here … I don’t use the Identify page all that much because I’m not a “power IDer.” Rather, I do most of my identifying from my dashboard / all updates page that pulls in all records from my area plus a few favorite taxa. When I open a record that has already attained RG from my dashboard, the Agree button is still there on the record although it’s been moved to a different spot. Still easy to add an agreeing ID. But this is apparently more of an issue re: speed and efficiency for those who regularly use the Identify page, correct?
I agree with the last one. But this has little to do with the present issue - it is not possible to evaluate RGs according to your system, if you do not know the IDer - which is often the case. As to the confirmations of RGs by an expert - you are lucky you have such possibility. I don’t. There are too few lichenologists and most of them do not go outside their area (often as narrow as a country).
It’s worth noting that people who supported the change will probably be underrepresented in this analysis becase they’ll have less strong opinions and maybe assume that it’s now the status quo so it doesn’t need support.
Even though I do quite a bit of identifying (through the Identify page) this change barely effects me because I almost only identify Needs ID observations. I’ve definitely noticed and been frustrated with too many agreeing identifiers (both on my observations, on the few occasions when I identify birds, and watching users who ID just for the leaderboard) so I supported the change, but I didn’t feel the need to explain why. The fact that I’m not really directly affected by the change means I’m perhaps in less position to say though.
Yeah and only for people who are identifying Research Grade observations.
It surely depends greatly on what kind of IDing you do. If you concentrate on Needs ID, the changes have virtually no impact at all. I would have thought those who mostly add agreeing ID to lots of RG observations every day would tend to have much stronger opinions.
Already commented on the initial blog post but figured I’d chime in here with one or two extra thoughts…
This morning I thought ‘maybe I’m just overreacting. maybe I’m just being grumpy about change’. So I went about my normal morning IDing routine. For Orthoptera in New England and NY, it wasn’t too big a deal since I am usually the only one adding IDs. But in FL, my work definitely took more time due to Romalea microptera (as I mentioned in my other comment), which is oftentimes ID’d correctly by 2 or more people. But it is always worth looking through them - since there are always a few spectacularly wrong IDs at least every other day. I am using all the keyboard shortcuts and have been for a while now. So for me, it is definitely an inconvenience - perhaps not the biggest problem in the world, but adds time for sure.
However I think more importantly than my own little woes are the plethora and diversity of unhappy identifiers. I recognize a LOT of high-volume (and high-quality!) identifiers among those who are displeased here - many people whose IDs I have come to trust and learn from over the past several years, across many taxonomic groups. Especially significant is the point made somewhere above (can’t find where it is) that some identifiers may not have fast or reliable internet, and this makes things much more difficult for them. The fact that so many people who have been involved with iNat for a long time and do great volunteer work here are unhappy about this change speaks volumes.
I am still not sure what to do about the lingering problem of leaderboard-gaming and high-volume IDers who are just upping their ID count without actually having any careful thought process - but I do not believe this change is helpful in solving that issue.
I would also like to point out that there appears to be a qualitative difference in the comments from “pro” and “against” users.
Unless I have missed something, the “pro” users are all essentially saying: “This doesn’t bother me” or “I don’t see what the big deal is”, rather than detailing specific benefits of the change to their use of the site.
On the other hand, the “against” users are explaining the multitude of reasons this change has a negative effect on their use of the site.
I still see very little logic behind this change. The logic detailed in the original post is pretty thin, and I would argue, incorrect. The two sentences explaining the rationale are:
“We did this to discourage people from adding redundant identifications to observations that don’t need them, i.e. observations that no longer “need IDs” because there’s already a community consensus at the species level.”
I think these threads provide abundant evidence that this statement rests on a faulty assumption that observations at RG do not need additional identifications.
“I suspect most people add IDs like this because they’re fixated on increasing their identifications count.”
This isn’t supported with any data in the post, and I would suggest it is not correct. Looking through the leaderboards for taxa I interact with, the leaders are generally very good or expert identifiers who contribute substantially to the community. This seems very close to the literal definition of the idiom “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”.
