After letting another day go by and thinking about this, the biggest problem I have with this change is something that kiwifergus already mentioned: it discourages a community of experts working together. One reason I have stayed with iNat for 8 years now is that I have learned a lot from the platform–more from identifying than from posting my own observations.
Part of what makes this interesting is that taxonomy is a moving target, both because the taxonomists are making discoveries that change or refine what we know, and the naturalist community sometimes discovers that we’ve been incorrectly identifying something for years. I’m personally most likely to notice these shifts when I have subscribed to many observations. And I see the comments that others leave on observations.
If you want to continue this experiment, please add a keyboard accelerator to the Identify page to subscribe to an observation (ideally, a single key that both marks as reviewed and subscribes since I want to do both to many observations).
Well, from your words it will be a good thing if percentage of Geralds and Subfamily Ennominae increases on iNaturalist? Just for the sake of community building?
Another of my points… that subfamily ID is “correct”. It doesn’t take a lot of explicit disagreements to bump back these mis-IDs to a coarser level. However there seems to be an element of “I am right, and unless the CID agrees with me the the world is broken and needs to be fixed”.
I would wear the Gerald t-shirt! Some would argue that there can be only one [Gerald], but then there is that project “Geralds of the World” which kinda implies more than one, and to a certain degree that they are valued!
I would also want that accelerator function to only send me notifications when a dissenting ID is added, not every time an additional agreement to the consensus is added. That’s one of the reasons I currently use “agrees” on RG observations, rather than subscribing to them.
Are you just asuming or have you checked onthe initial agreers for the moth? Well, I did check. Half of them are 10-20 day wonders, to appear on iNat and never come back having done their damage. Others are occasional visitors with several IDs, mostly agreements.
So are you saying the problem is the non-responsive identifiers, rather than the activity of the regulars? Then why is it a good thing to impact the regulars and not the non-responsives? Perhaps if we encourage them to be long term active participants instead of having conversations on their observations about the state of their brains?
I do find it ironic to read ~so~ much blow back for this change after reading so many postings for so many months critiquing the Agree button function. My impression was that people thought it was a big hinderance to ID quality . Now, missing it is a big hinderance to ID quality.
I think the Gerald examples (e.g. 20 erroneous agreeing IDs on a small number of obs, from many short-term “duress” users) are almost all results of poorly planned school projects. The problem being discussed more here I think is more like 5 erroneous (or even correct) agreeing IDs on many obs, by a small number of users. Neither issue is improved by the Agree button but the best solutions for each might be different.
I have noticed that too, and analysing my own reaction, it is because it has been badly implemented. This problem essentially boils down to users making IDs and then either not being around to change their IDs, or just plain refusing to do so. A far better solution to the problem would be to make IDs challengeable. If an ID is challenged, and the identifier does not respond to the challenge within a period of time their id becomes ineffectual toward CID calculation. This only if challenged and not defended though… My reaction to this change is because it seems many other far better solutions have not been considered. That this “fix” has taken priority over the rewording of the explicit disagreements dialog, which for me personally had been more destructive to my iNat experience than any “piling on” or “leaderboard races”… I fully appreciate that others don’t care as much as I do about that explicit disagreement issue, but then we each have different values, yes? I’m just expressing mine :)
Were people critiquing the “Agree button function”, or issues that arose through incorrect or blind agreement?
I also wonder if the people who are vocally opposing this change though, are usually active in the forum or not? And how much of a bubble the forum is in terms of broader community representation…
But it’s not really damage! The world is not broken because a couple students tried iNat and didn’t get as passionate about it as the rest of us! At least they had the opportunity! You are like the music teacher that criticises the learner students… “We only want the serious students, not you noisy ones that just want to make fart noises with the mouth pieces”… That teacher always got more fart noises, whereas the one that chuckled and then challenged them to see what other noises they could make always made the best musicians!
No, I am not a music teacher. I am researcher who uses iNaturalist data. And who wants to involve more colleague experts to the site. Geralds don’t help in either.
Sorry, I knew that… It was me giving up on trying to make my point. To carry on the analogy, her being a researcher carries over to the analogy as a conductor of a national orchestra coming into a school and being upset at the quality of the musicians in the school band… iNat core mission is to promote activity of all levels and ability, and science is welcome to extract whatever is useful. It is a positive thing to be engaging with iNat and encouraging better quality, but I personally draw the line at holding conversations on people’s observations that denigrate their contribution.
I most often use “reviewed” when I either don’t know what something is or don’t judge it worthwhile to look up (ie trying to key something out for 20 minutes that someone else will know on sight). I’d be ok if reviewed was a “soft agree” but in that case I think it should be visible who reviewed and there should be another Parallel option for “I don’t know”. Maybe people wouldn’t want that public though I wouldn’t care but I think it would be valuable to at least know how many others looked at the observation and didn’t know… if it’s like 20 I would consider marking “no further ID needed”.
I most often do IDs in Needs ID or else things like edge of range observations. The former it doesn’t matter. The latter it’s nice to be able to agree too.
I honestly thought adding a further agreement to an observation with 3 or 4 already was a GOOD thing to do. It increases confidence and shows community interest and also the notifications for agreeing IDs can be turned off.
The devs and admins have access to website statistics that we don’t. Without knowing for sure how this falls out it’s hard to speculate. Where more useless leaderboard-mongering IDs come from? What about a timer that doesn’t let you agree to too many RG observations above a certain speed? Public stats about who only agrees with RG ids? Seems like lots of possible options that could be tried.
