This feature really has no reason to exist. iNaturalist exists as a social network where people can post and identify living organisms. This feature is frustrating because it allows users to upload completely wrong identifications, and it doesn’t change when you disagree with it. This is only adding false information to the data maps. Furthermore, even Genus-level observations can be considered “Research grade” for people who opt out of community taxon! what!?
There is quite literally no benefit to opting out of community taxon.
This comes up on the forum pretty frequently. When I first joined iNat, I felt the same way- why on earth would someone place their own personal opinion about an ID on a pedestal above what everyone else in the community thinks? It seemed so egotistical to do such a thing. I’ve since found a number of cases where it’s been useful though.
-Sometimes a few “serial agree-ers” agree to an ID that I initially suggest, then I realize I was wrong, change the ID, but the “agree-ers” are unresponsive or have left the platform. Eventually I’ll get enough other people to come out-vote them, but in the meantime I click the opt-out button to make the observation show up under the correct ID.
-Sometimes identifiers add an ID that is clearly a mis-click (adding a plant ID to an animal with the same name, for example), and the observation gets pushed back to “life”, where no one is likely to look at it. If I can’t get them to respond, I’ll opt out to get the observation back to the right general taxon so it gets attention from the relevant experts.
So I see it as really a way to temporarily overcome obvious misidentifications that the identifier won’t change because they’re unresponsive.
Then there’s the separate question of users who preemptively opt out on virtually all their observations. This is always a topic of contention, with some folks adamantly against it as a practice because it’s not in the community spirit, and others adamantly defending it on the grounds that they want ownership of the IDs on all their observations. Some are so against it that they deliberately ignore all observation from users who opt out, and others are so in favor that they’ve threatened to leave the platform if it’s not allowed as a practice. At this point it’s been argued to death and no one is changing their minds, so we’ve just sort of agreed to disagree.
Genus-level observations can always achieve “Research Grade” if someone votes that the ID cannot be improved past genus. This isn’t unique to opt-outs.
I opted out of community ID. The social side of inat isn’t all that interesting for me. I use Inat as a way to keep a record of things that I observe at my place. It is useful when I get suggestions by other people of an ID for an organism that I am not sure of, but I want to research and be sure before I agree. Taxon splits etc of common organisms are another thing. When I have always had a name for something common and then I get informed the name has changed, I don’e see that I have to accept that. Also there are a lot of IDs that are wrong and I would have to go to some trouble to get them corrected. I actually find it a bit embarrassing when my obs are incleded in the ALA maps, it wasn’t what I really intended.
I’m considering using it on a set of organisms I’ve been tracking for months. I’m fairly certain I’ve located a set of hybridized Brassicas and have spent at this time, at least thirty hours of my own personal time traveling to the site, assessing, measuring, etc. There’s some literature about this type of hybridization via research papers but no herbarium samples that I can find.
Somebody recently IDed on item in the set incorrect with a note of “I’m pretty sure it’s _____” when it doesn’t key out to that thing at all. Consider the time and effort I’ve put into tracking these, and documenting them at all life stages, it’s frustrating when something like that happens.
The platform provides a great tool to document what I’ve found. For my use case, I’m likely going to start opting out of the community taxon with this set until I can confirm what I’ve found. The use case seems a good fit.
I’ll also defer to the other forum posts on this topic.
I used to feel the same way about the subject. However, since I have started focusing on mosses, my views have changed a lot. I prefer to have a broad ID on a moss until I can go back at a later date in order to perform microscopy to get a positive identification. It turns out it is very difficult to search for these observations after people have added finer IDs which many times turn out to be wildly incorrect.
There are scenarios where it is useful, e.g. when a user adds an incorrect, disagreeing CV-based identification to an observation of yours that you are confident you’ve correctly identified (this has happened to me before). If you’re working on a project using a specific taxonomic framework it could also be useful, as it allows one to bypass the frequent taxon splits and lumps on the site based on very recent research.
I disagree, it’s a useful feature that absolutely should exist and the number of times it’s a problem are outnumbered by how many times it’s useful. For example, I have an observation of an obscure central american salamander that I took a lot of time digging into papers to identify. Two separate random accounts posted different IDs on it without justifying it (or replying when I asked why), so for me to have that record show up as what it should be the opt-out feature is the only way, since the odds of anyone else actually IDing that are pretty low.
As for the problem ones, there are ways to fix it by making them casual (ie adding a bunch of opposing IDs and then marking it as “can’t be improved”)
Yes it does. As you know, iNaturalist policy is to respect the observer’s intentions, e.g., if two organisms are visible in one image, and the notes indicate which organism was the intended observation, we are to identify the one indicated. As you no doubt also know, not everyone pays attention to this; some identifiers will go ahead and identify the more obvious (to them) organism or the one with which they are more familiar. This can lead to a kingdom-level disagreement, relegating the observation to “life” where identifiers who search by taxon will not see it.The only way to fix this is for the observer to opt-out until such time as other identifiers accumulate to counteract the vandalism.
I fully agree it should be possible to opt-out on a per-observation basis.
I’m a bit uneasy about a user opting out on all observations though.
Maybe I would not be so concerned if there was a better way to handle the case where a user opts-out on all observations then several identifiers come along and all agree one specific observation is something else. Maybe something as simple as it will no longer show up on searches for that original taxon?
If the observer posts a mistaken ID and won’t change it though several of us post the correct ID, we can mark the observation “No, it can’t be improved” and it will go to Casual. A waste, but sometimes appropriate.
I don’t like people opting out of community ID, but there are a few situations where it is useful. A person just marking all the observations “opt out” doesn’t really make sense to me. I’d be happier if that were not an option. I doubt this will be changed, though.
It has been interesting reading all the different reasons that serious iNat users have for using this setting. My only experience with it has been with frivolous users with no desire to identify things correctly, so I tended to agree with the idea that it was a bad feature. As an example, there is a user I’ve encountered who gives their own observations IDs of species that don’t occur even in this hemisphere, much less this country. As soon as someone adds a correct ID, they opt out and their own ridiculous ID is the one that stays. So I am happy to know there is a legitimate use for this option!
Frustrations with this feature seem to be localized to infrequent, anecdotal experiences with specific users. iNaturalist does not provide much precision in its data; it is a website for citizen science. I find the tendency to want to police the data here misguided and perhaps steeped in a form of self-importance.
Personally, I opt out of community ID because I use iNat almost every day, and if someone corrects/disagrees with one of my IDs I can change it pretty quickly if I was initially wrong. The plus side to this is that users who (quite frankly) aren’t as knowledgable as me can’t kick an observation back to genus level (and thus removing it from the species map) when they disagree with me.
I find that most users who have actual deep knowledge in specific groups of organisms don’t need community ID. If this frustrates you then you may need to re-evaluate what you think iNaturalist is.
I disagree. The APIs allow you to extract only your data and present it however you wish. This means that inat is as precise as you are. I can understand why you’d want to opt out. By opting out, I assume you’re able to be precise.
I understand where you’re coming from. Several thoughts:
Several prolific opt-out observers who did check the site regularly, unfortunately, passed. This renders a substantial portion of their contributions to iNat obsolete, as they can no longer benefit from their own observations, and their incorrect IDs will never be corrected or will languish in casual grade. This is unfortunate because many of the observations by the power users who opt out of community ID are valuable—range expansions, records of rare species, etc. I submit that it is probably better to just opt out of community ID on a case by case basis. After all, you are checking regularly, and I suspect that the majority of the identifications you receive are confirming your ID or giving a refined ID, rather than disagreeing with your ID.
Few, if any, observers are experts in everything they upload to iNaturalist. In general, identifiers are more knowledgeable than observers (there are obviously exceptions). I have personally started avoiding adding IDs to certain users who have opted out of community ID and quite literally put more weight on iNaturalist’s “Visually Similar” tool than my well researched IDs. And since I often work to ID taxa based on 200 year old translated descriptions and drawings, including sources not available online or in print, there is sometimes no one on iNaturalist with the background knowledge to add a meaningful identification so we can mark “good as can be.”
I hope even if this doesn’t convince you to opt-in to community ID, it at least opens your eyes to the legitimate concerns of those who recommend against default opt-out.
Actually, I do view Casual as a wasteland. There are some potentially good observations there but they’re hard to find. (Those cultivated/captive observation in “Casual” are potentially valuable and should be separated from the ones without photos or data, etc. – a different frustrating topic.) Putting observations in Casual is especially a waste for a good but misidentified observation (one that can’t be ID’d correctly because of the “opt out”). However, if they stay in Needs ID, they just takes up identifier time to no purpose. Wherever those misidentified observations are, they’re not useful for research because researchers aren’t going to find them under the wrong name. So I just make them Casual. Sigh.
Ok. I give up. I’ll just mark them no…as good as they can be. I’m not particularly happy to do it though.
I’m not sure I understand the rule that pushes these to casual, though. I was under the impression that this sometimes pushes observations to research grade.
BTW, I was referring to observations as described by @natev .
Genus-level research grade can be useful. A lot of organisms can’t be identified to species level without a dissection or microscopy, which many people don’t have access to, or are impossible to get. For example, observing avian pox viruses on a live bird (without a permit to catch and test the bird) is still useful as a way to track diseases like this, find out what species of birds they’re occurring on, what time of year, and in what circumstances, even if they can’t be identified any further. I’ve seen people use the “can’t be improved” bump to RG on genus level in a few specific and useful cases.
How opt-out works is that it still will only become RG if community agrees with them; it doesn’t bump the observation to RG on its own. But the observation will be listed under the observer’s original ID on the map and in observations, even if the community disagrees and it is not RG. They will still be marked “needs ID” or “casual” and the marker on the map will lack the dot symbol indicating it’s RG. Luckily these can easily be filtered out of observation searches when necessary, also.