I’ve never been tempted to use “opt out.” In real life, I’m an expert in certain plants. In fact, there have been times when maybe only 2 or 3 other people in the world were better at IDing a given species that I was and they weren’t on iNaturalist. (It’s no longer true; more and more people learn these plants and more of them are on iNaturalist.) But I never felt a need to avoid all other ID’s. Maybe one reason is simply that many of the plants I’m an expert in are of little interest to most people, so there are few other ID’s to outvote, and at least the few wrong ID’s don’t send the observation to RG with the wrong ID.
I’ve “unfollowed” one person who opted out and didn’t change ID’s even when he was unquestionably wrong, and I’d do that sort of thing again. However, whether the observation has an “opt out” isn’t obvious when using the identify tool, so that’s usually not a basis for choosing to ID or not.
I think it would be wrong to send an observation with “opt out” to Casual (using “No, it can’t be improved”) if I’m putting the first disagreeing ID on an observation!* However, I think it’s totally justified for those older observations that stay Needs ID because they’ve got 5 or 6 agreeing, correct ID’s but the observer had put a different, wrong name on it, opted out, and doesn’t change anything.
- Except dandelions.
You could be right, simply because so few people opt out for all their observations. I ID a lot. Sometimes I find that I don’t know how to distinguish species I thought I did. I try to learn how to ID them correctly or learn not to put names on them. And sometimes the taxon concepts I used (for good reasons) are not the ones that were accepted in the end. I hope I haven’t done a lot of damage, but I know I’ve done some, and have tried to correct some of that. (Memory of spending a day or two trying to undo ID errors certainly encourages one to avoid getting into that problem again.)
[Edit: Finally there’s some concensus on that The Blackberries That Ate The Pacific Northwest are, and they’re not what I called them. Many (possibly a majority) aren’t the other name most commonly applied to them, either. I’m intimidated by the numbers involved! Maybe this winter.]
What is your evidence for this? I ask because there was some frustrating discussion on a different thread with a person who thought that the symbol indicating the CV had been used meant that it was used for the identification. Like a lot of people who do many identifications, I click on a CV name if I know it is right because that’s a lot faster than typing it in. I’m impressed with how often the CV is right, but also with how laughably wrong it is at times.
I do think using the CV can create some problems. For one thing, there are the misclicks! Olympic Grasshopper when I meant Olympic Gull, for example. More seriously, there are edge cases, where I think I know what it is but I’m not sure. Can the CV ID tip me over to adding the ID when I’m not confident? Yes. I try to resist that, but my rate of resistance varies. In a data quality sense, the misclicks are too rare to be more than a trivial problem. The other can be more consistent and therefore more of an issue. Nonetheless, this is a limited problem because most of us “power identifiers” ID mostly species we know well, and the CV does not contribute to those ID’s.