Why not do away with comparisons at all, any ordering system other than alphabetization, and instead encourage local and then umbrella (national) organizers to compare year to year statistics.
“This year we saw 1500 observations of 250 species. Last year we saw 1200 observations of 236 species. While this would appear to be all positive news, the following expected species were actually not observed…” etc.
I for one would like to see more movement toward post-CNC local data analysis, the “why is this important”, which maybe would bring abot more “stayers”, and less energy expended toward finding ranking options and systems, which while I understand the motivation to be fairness, ultimately just seem like ways to compete.
My initial suggestion was “to prevent Blank (Unknown) and Life to be selected by users” so what you asked doesn’t ralate at all. Actually it’s even closer to what it currently is (where users can select Life or leave Blank, which literally becomes Unknown, the problem we’re discussing above).
Exactly. Blank (= Unknown = No ID) is strictly removed. Life can’t be selected as ID suggestion but appears only in some cases of ID disagreements and available as criteria choice when querying for observations.
You have uploaded 100 obs. With no ID. Here is a - friendly, simple, basic, straight forward tutorial to teach you how to sort your obs into Kingdoms. Once that is done, you may upload the next 100.
Another (easily done) tutorial for the broken obs. No picture / audio. Missing date and / or location.
We can dream - an advanced tutorial to clear out - blurred something, My Shoe, outright duplicates careless / mistaken / malicious, please combine multiple pictures into one obs. For which we would need new DQAs so the problems can be retrieved.
After 500 obs, the next tutorial could be geared to your preferred Kingdom. And so on down the taxon levels. You are interested in green striped mantis - here is a project for that.
That tutorial barrier would need to be paired with draft mode for observers who add their IDs when they are back home / in the office / have internet connection.
Seems many projects e.g. XPrize… just toss “Observation” posts to the wall to see if any stick.
I spend a fair amount of time trying to add IDs to bat call data which can be invaluable as many Cit. Sci folks are collecting data in areas where there have been no formal surveys. Even for common species such data is important. However, many projects post these “observations” and hope that someone will add an ID for them. Buying a bat detector or getting an app for ones phone with an ultra-sonic mic may allow users to record data. But like what has been discussed above, just because you have a camera on your phone and can take a picture of some mass of vegetation hoping someone IDs what is in the frame may not be very useful. For the XPrize data there apparently was no follow up or interest in correcting the results after the correct IDs were added, apparently. So is this like the oft quoted “He who dies with the most toys wins” attributed to Malcolm Forbes… “He who dies with the most iNat posts wins”?
If someone forces me to put a potentially wrong ID on an observation just to load it, I would leave iNat.
If I don’t know, I don’t know. The kingdom is not always obvious.
It is easier to support new users when they come in smaller groups or during the season of their preferred subject.
Support wise the CNC is a bad design- those who could assist new users are already overwhelmed by artificial deadlines to load obs or to identify.
CNC should report on new user retention and compare it with new user retention for periods clear of CNC and other mass events.
If you require informal learners to do a complex task in order to participate in a project, many of the informal learners will leave the project. There was one citizen science project that wanted their volunteers to do more advance tasks so that the project could get better data. The project leaders set up roadmap of how to get all their citizen scientists to do the advance tasks. Only a small percentage of the citizen scientists went through the training. The majority of citizen scientists weren’t interested in the advance skills. The project leaders ended up scaling back their plan.
There is a big difference in giving volunteers the training if they decide to do advance tasks, and requiring all volunteers to do advance tasks. Your suggestion that all iNaturalist users have to do identifications will cause a lot of iNat users to quit iNat.
How do you propose to counter the rising tide of unlimited obs. Versus dwindling identifiers ? If not by encouraging those uploaders to make some IDs themselves.
I am frankly disappointed if ‘encouraging people to engage with nature’ sees animal / vegetable / mushroom as an advanced task. OK mushroom is not a plant - that is a challenge. How about animal or plant or other ? How do people cope in a supermarket - what is that - a carrot ??? Or a piece of dead bird - have a packet of chicken nuggets.
If you don’t make IDs - you don’t care about - in focus - fill the frame - capture field marks (what might they be ?!) Don’t nobody care if the date or location are correct. Or if the photo is mine, not scraped from somewhere for eye candy.
Never mind. South Africa is under an internet DOS attack. AWS is so slow that my iNat pictures are sunk somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Cannot ID obs without their pictures. I’m out.
Sorry, but this is not accurate. If you think identifiers are “dwindling” please provide evidence. FWIW around 15k more accounts have added at least one ID for another user over the last month or so.
As I’ve said a few times elsewhere on the forum, the new app makes it much more difficult to upload an observation without an ID, and it also is basically “draft mode” so I think that problem will be mitigated eventually. In my anecdotal experience, most “unknown” observations are posted via Android, which has a different workflow.
I would also contend that people posting an “unknown” observation, while not ideal, is not a severe problem. I would much prefer people post something with out an ID than either a) being absolutely forced to choose an ID they don’t know or b) deciding they don’t know what to pick and not uploading the observation. It’s very easy for the community to add basic IDs to “unknown” observations and get them in front of the eyes of the right people. It’s much more difficult to overturn incorrect IDs. It’s also a great training ground for anyone looking to help out with IDs. The two main downsides are 1) it may take some time for the observer to get a taxonomically fine ID and 2) there’s less friction so people can add a lot more observations quickly, which can be overwhelming.
No, if that were the case it would need to be possible to ‘identify’ something as ‘unknown’, but it is not. ‘Unknown’ is simply for observations where the observer hasn’t entered an ID. To upload something to iNat should you should at least have a suspicion that something is a life form, or that it is evidence of the presence of a life-form. If this proves not to be the case, the DQA ‘no evidence of organism’ is used. The vast majority of things that go into unknown are plants. The observers certainly knew they were plants; they probably just didn’t know that saying so was desirable or possible.
Here, in India, I am dying to even load a single page of observations. lol.
One month back I thought the identify page is useless. Now I am using it like crazy.
The difference? My images are sunken somewhere in the Eastern Pacific rim (Philippines, new Guinea, Australia, Indonesia etc. which are filled with insular endemics).
Yes also the drafts offline note just disappeared but it was there fore a while. Internet still fluctuating.
You can, even then, say that you are lucky. I get so bored at looking at the same species over and over again, that I am nearly forced to look at insular endemics only. Otherwise, everything feels too normal. And even if observers add an id, we “taxon specialists” have to look though it all.
