there’s only so much more to say on this subject given that this seems to come up in a forum thread at least once every month or two. I just want to say a single thing: my concern with globally opting out is the problem, as mentioned above, of what happens when someone is no longer able to curate their own observations. while someone is alive and engaged, I’m fine with entertaining them doing what they want with their data; but are those data, after they’re gone or no longer engaged, to be forever frozen in amber? for a simile I think is like this situation: it’s all well and good to maintain a locked display case of my specimens and not incorporate other people’s taxonomic determinations while I’m around to curate those specimens and can make my own reasoned judgments about their identification – but what good does it do me to never give anyone the key to the case when I’m gone, and prevent any future changes to specimens I will no longer be able to revisit?
maybe it’s just a difference in philosophy, but I struggle to wrap my mind around the idea that when someone is no longer present to care for their records, no one else should still be allowed to touch them. for better or worse, physical items pass on to someone else’s care in the world, and while someone’s wishes for their own records can be made legally or verbally clear for when they are not present or have passed away, I personally presume that I can’t imagine the circumstances in which my data may be useful in 200 years hence – and so I don’t want to put restrictions on how they can be used that permanently lock them away.
Is there an easy way to filter out such observations? I think everyone would be much more friendly to the feature, if we could also “opt out” of seeing those observations in searches.
No, and that’s a very good thing. You are still free to move along if feeling offended that a knowledgeable specialist, who was considerate enough to upload a trove of reference observations on this site to help others, prefers not to deal with the usual mess of nonsensical/misguided ID suggestions forcefully applied to their content. It does not imply that they are stubborn or uncommunicative and would not revisit their IDs… if presented with insightful comments.
Just like with centuries-old herbaria and type material, people (hopefully knowledgeable ones) are free to add tiny stickers or labels with their own identifications in addition to the ‘wrong’ (obsolete) identifications of deceased others. It’s not a problem if the late 19th-c. observer is no longer around to agree to some new ID and ‘revisit’ stuff - the old initial name still gets retained, and searchable, and referred to.
Also, iNatters can opt out of automatic (and sometimes misguided) taxon changes being forced upon their obs, and that’s fine too.
But - identifiers would like to be given the choice. Should be an available filter like Not Wild (which I do choose to ID).
If Opted Out of Community Taxon were a banner up top. With RG or Needs ID or Casual. Identifiers would not have to hunt down WHY does this ID not move. Patient queue of taxon specialists basically wasting their time and effort.
JP has a project to use with his yellow label phylogenetic projects
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/user-has-opted-out-of-community-taxon-observation
Observations without id. (or high rank id.) from observers that have opted-out, for these observations only.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-opting-out-of-community-id-unavailable-to-new-users/38192 41 votes Under Review
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/should-opting-out-community-id-be-void-if-the-user-is-deceased/62176 79 comments
AFAIK the ‘this user has opted-out of community id blah blah’ message is in plain sight near the top of each obs, already. If people don’t want to engage with others depending on their language, or country, or field of expertise, that’s fine - and I concur that the platform should ideally offer to fine-tune all kinds of filters in order to prevent interacting with “these people that I don’t want in my iNat or messing with my observations”. This all sounds reasonable. IIRC there are various feature requests related to filtering/muting unwanted categories of users, but I wouldn’t hold my breath ;)
However I disagree that adding IDs to opted-out obs (ideally together with insighful remarks, in the hope that an observer will revisit their ID and learn something along the way) is a “waste of time”. It even seems strange to me that expressing one’s views can feel wasteful if it does not affect others immediately (or at all). I may be wrong, but some opted-out users out there might still be reasonable human beings open to discussing stuff, who simply favour a different form of “community interaction” and “site usage” than “getting IDs on photos” and “submit to the majority opinion no matter what”. Interaction that goes a tiny step beyond a click on ‘agree’ or ‘taxon X’.
edit: let’s dream about a feature: allow users to opt-out selectively, not a global on/off, not on an obs-by-obs basis. Example: I personally would like to “automatically opt-out” for all my uploads of “vascular plants in this area”. To protect somehow those obs that I share not to gather IDs, but to introduce others to the local flora. Everything else would still be subject to Community IDs (my – few – uploads of fungi and moss and animals, or exotic stuff photographed while on vacation)
I personally do not ID opted out observations anymore and yes do feel this would be a waste of my time. I even go as far as deleting my ID when I just after realize that the observer has opted out.
In my experience most opted out observations do not get tended to, even after specifically tagging or messaging the observer (just counting those cases where they are still active) leaving wrong IDs out in the open (I am happy that we can at least DQA it to casual, so those observations do not appear on maps).
Some observers that opted out will change their ID according to new suggestions.. some of them even almost immediately, true. I mean they have to if they want to get to RG. Do they have the knowledge to independently come to this new ID? I claim that in most cases they do not care but just click agree, because who could have this knowledge in a wide field of organisms, even if one is very good at IDing certain organisms?
So in my experience generally opted out observers will either not react to IDs or will indiscriminately agree with what they probably cannot really verify independently… both of the cases are unsatisfying for me and I chose not to support. If there was a possibility to mark each observation of such observers as reviewed I would do so
We all use iNat differently. I ID not as a taxon specialist in a small focused corner - but across the problem batches. Which skews my view of how iNat works.
I start with the oldest obs - 10 or 12 years old. Some have sat for years. With multiple taxon specialists adding IDs. Working scientists are busy and should not be expected to fiddle with Why is iNat NOT doing what I expect it to?!
We appreciate their biodiversity knowledge and their time. But I don’t blame them for not noticing AHA Opted Out! Now I look for that first on problem / new obs. For opted out taxon specialists that I recognise - yes - Mark as Reviewed and move on, since we both know I cannot add value.
I agree. In my experience, the large majority of times I have IDed opted-out observations, one of two outcomes has occurred:
-
The ID has remained incorrect (this is of course my opinion of the ID which I am quite sure is correct).
-
The observer has just agreed with my ID, likely without the expertise to do so.
Neither are ideal. I would prefer not to interact with observations where the observer has opted out of CID. While I respect the observer’s choice to opt out, I would also like the choice to opt out of encountering these observations when IDing. Sadly, the feature request for this (which @opisska asked about) was declined:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/implement-a-new-filter-for-observations-that-opt-out-of-community-id/27053
I was tempted a couple of times to opt out for some observations. These were either blurry photos or grainy due to distance and were misidentified.
If I opt out, someone will make them casual. Can’t win.
How about something like this but only in the case where the observer’s id disagrees with the community id. (Words could be improved…this is too long.)
How do I know that the person is a “knowledgeable specialist”? How do I know that they aren’t a “knowledgeable specialist” only in their own opinion?
This and several other posts here show a weird kind of hubris. I honestly don’t know about a large part of the tree of life, but in the parts that I do know, ID from images is an imprefect art and even revered experts sometimes disagree or simply miss. I would never claim that I know the ID of something better than everyone else. So excuse me if I want to look at data vetted by the entire community, instead of arbitrary self-proclaimed “experts”.
I am not saying that opted-out observations shouldn’t be here - on the contrary, the more data is always the better, but since they miss a core tenet of all the other observations, they should be filterable - and I would even say that they should be hidden by default, because a newcomer can be hardly expected to understand these nuances.
Opted Out from CID
should fit. With a mouseover text to expand CID to Community Taxon.
It is not. Depending on what interface one is using when IDing, it may not be visible at all (e.g., when using the Identify module).
Even if one has opened the observation – which for many of us is a less efficient workflow than using Identify – the notice that the observer has opted out of community taxon is over on the right-hand side of the observation, outside the line of sight where we find virtually all other relevant bits of information that are relevant when IDing (media, notes, comments, previous IDs, etc.), meaning that one has to actively know about it and look for it in order to determine why an observation is not behaving as expected.
It is a waste of time if the opted-out observer is non-responsive – which, in my experience, is the case more often than not. If I am the 4th or 5th person trying to refine or correct an opted-out observation, my ID adds no value in the sense that it does not provide any new knowledge that was not already provided by the IDers before me.
IDers are under no obligation to provide an explanation of their IDs and many IDers have learned from experience that most observers do not care about their reasons for the ID. If one opts out because one wants control over one’s observations, it seems to me that one has an even greater obligation to actively seek out information about the IDs one receives rather than expecting IDers to make an extra effort and provide that information without asking. IDers cannot know you are interested in understanding an ID unless you explicitly tell them. Opting out is not equivalent to doing this.
Again, my experience is that observers who have globally opted out are not any more likely than other users to ask questions and try to understand the ID. So the reasoning that users opt out because it allows them to do their own research before accepting IDs provided by others is not reflected by their actual behavior in many cases. Were this different, many of us would probably be less skeptical about the usefulness of globally opting out.
This is precisely why I, personally, choose to use opt-out as infrequently as possible. I hope that my contributions to iNat will outlive me as records of organisms, and I want to make it as easy as possible for people to correct my mistakes after I’m gone. My background is in working with natural history collections, and most of the specimens in these collections were collected by people who have long since passed away. The idea of having an ID on these specimens that can never be changed by posterity seems silly to me. I move specimens around in collections all the time as taxonomy changes and mistakes are found. I want the people who go through my iNat records when I’m dead to have just as easy a time fixing my mistakes and updating my outdated taxonomy. If I thought I’d still be around to personally update my IDs 60 years from now, I’d opt out all day long. But I know that 60 years from now, whether iNat exists or not, I sure won’t be around to update anything on it. In the long term, I think that leaving the IDs to the community will lead to fewer mistakes overall than insisting on my own opinion defining my observations for all time. There are certainly cases where it’s useful, plenty of which have been brough up here, but the “what if I drop dead tomorrow?” consideration is what pulls my finger back from the “opt out” button most times I consider it.
I get that for some users though, leaving a record of their finds for posterity isn’t much of a consideration for why they use iNat, so this thought probably doesn’t have much of an impact for their choices.
Check their profile? Take 15 or 20 seconds to search their name on Google (or Scholar). Eventually their OrcID, if any. Browse quickly their iNat observations, looking for obvious patterns (“oh, this dude has uploaded 2545 observations, all of dandelions, all identified to species: either he’s an arrogant weirdo, or he’s the ultimate dandelion nerd”). Check a few arguments they used to defend their IDs, how sound and grounded that knowledge seems. Check a few IDs or comments they provided other users with, to try and see how much info it conveyed. Then you might, eventually, start to consider the remote possibility that they might be slightly more insightful about that peculiar subject – and even imagine why they may have chosen to opt-out. (Who knows, perhaps were they repeatedly annoyed by overzealous hubris-filled identifiers on a push-back-to-genus crusade because “dandelions can’t be IDed to species, duh”.)
Questioning others’ depth is a sane habit, reluctance to try and acknowledge various levels of expertise where it is likely to occur seems a bit extreme however - even if I understand it is usually well-meaning, based on strong democratic/egalitarian concerns and beliefs.
If I may revel in hubris a tad longer: it is already rude enough to be called the ‘maverick’ when one is right against 3+ well-meaning but unresponsive ‘ignoramuses’; but if opting out of the ‘vote of the public’ turns to social stigma and one’s precious obs are deliberately hidden and/or ‘casualized’, I’m definitely out :D
edit: I like the guideline ‘assume others are well-meaning’. Similarly, it would be nice not to assume “ill intent” (or “contempt for others’ opinion”, or “newbie mistake”) from people who opted out. Don’t automatically assume “misplaced hubris” or “tentative argument from authority” from people who express an area of expertise - question it if you like, but don’t disparage that useful info.
I strongly resonate with this. The amount of people who have knowledge of IDing Chironomids is so incredibly small on the site. For those who opt out, they have to agree to get it RG whether they have knowledge or not. Unless they delete their ID.
Honestly, it would be interesting if one could set opt out for specific taxa. That would be interesting. Theres nobody on the planet thats an expert at everything.
I will say that I personally didn’t realize you could opt out of only specific observations and not need to rely on turning it off for all observations! Since community ID is usually accurate, and there are only specific examples of a misguided IDer messing up an observation, it makes sense to opt-in by default. I will switch mine back on.
I find the desire to filter observations by community ID opt-in problematic. Is identifying observations on iNaturalist only useful when the identifier has a say on what the organism is? If I am offering my advice by way of suggesting an identity to an observation, its not skin off my back if my suggestion does not automatically influence the observation.
Seems like there are valid reasons for both opting in and out of community ID, why should we police how users want to use their data?
Regarding users who have many observations and have passed on, could there be a case-by-case solution for this? Perhaps submitting a ticket to iNat after so many years of inactivity or if it is known they have passed?
Also, I understand it can be frustrating when encountering a user who has opted out of community ID, but in my opinion that is less “obfuscating” to iNaturalist’s data than power-identifiers who maybe aren’t as knowledgeable about what they are identifying as they think. 100s of thousands of “best-guess” identifications put 100s of thousands of observations at Research Grade. This is especially concerning to me knowing that many such “power-identifiers” primarily rely on the Computer Vision. That alone can potentially lead to much more inaccuracy than the occasional opted-out user. This is very much so my opinion, of course, and am welcome to experiences that counter my own!
you’ve demonstrated at the very least that any simile comparing iNaturalist observations to herbarium specimens is flawed, because there is nothing as bizarre in herbaria as the iNaturalist “opt out of community taxon” setting. I encountered a stack of a half-dozen specimens the other day that had an ancient yellowed label saying “Please do not change the determinations on these specimens until more study is done”. guess what? I changed the determinations anyway! the curator gave the go-ahead, and there is no hard-coded barrier to prevent new identifications on them! not so in iNaturalist. just imagine if the specimens were somehow hard-locked against adding a new ID. whoever wrote the “do not change” label is long gone, and I doubt they meant for the specimens to simply sit forever — they probably just wanted a study to explicitly examine these individuals… but other studies have made it possible to identify them now.
nor are the vast majority of “opted out” iNaturalist observations as interesting to science as these tree specimens, most likely. but again, at this point, what more is there to say? people have dug in on their positions and will still be entrenched the next time a forum thread is posted about opting out of community taxon ID. count me as a professional deeply against the community taxon opt-out setting, but I’m surely not someone changing hearts and minds here.
This would be sound advice when dealing with individual observations. But for me a large use case of iNat is general searches: what lives where, where are the observations clustered, in what habitats etc… For this, I am looking at sets of data - I can’t possibly verify each an every point - but I don’t have to, because the entire site is built around a mechanism where the community does that for me. So is it really that weird to ask for means to restrict the data to those?
The “assume good will” instruction is key in individual communication - I would never go to someone’s observation and tell them they shouldn’t opt out! But it’s absurd to apply to using data - nobody is gonna get their feelings hurt by my search excluding their observations, since they aren’t gonna know about it.
For better or worse, another difference between the two is that the “collector” (observer) retains complete ownership over the “specimen” (observation) and all “annotations” (identifications) added to it. This is implemented by allowing the observer to delete any or all of their observations at any time, taking all the attached IDs and comments with them.
I don’t want this to become yet another discussion around account deletion. Just making the point that allowing observers to opt-out of community ID fits well within this ownership paradigm for iNat observations which, for various reasons discussed elsewhere, seems unlikely to change.
That said, there have already been suggestions in other threads (some already mentioned by @DianaStuder) that could go a long way toward de-conflicting observers and identifiers around this issue, such as
- Indexing all observation by both Community ID and Observation ID, so that either one can be used in filters, maps, etc. (old open Feature Request, and another related one)
- Adding a voluntary user profile setting where anyone can time-limit their opt-out choice, based on a period of account inactivity, and/or the age of the opt-out. (Discussed but not yet submitted as a Feature Request - someone please do so!)
- Disable opting out until new accounts reach a certain age and/or number of observations (open Feature Request)
I would add the ability to filter observations by opted-out status but, as @cthawley already noted, this was already requested and declined a while ago.