Limit the Power to Convert "Needs ID" obs to "Research Grade"

If that was about my post, I’m good with Tony’s comments :) It’s not so much combative as a fair expression of how he interpreted my comment. I was going to add in response “that is pretty much what is happening now”.

And I think Tony’s comments are perfect in line with the title… he is talking about a reputation system that puts the majority of power (to convert Needs ID to RG) in the hands of those who can use it wisely… and takes it away from those that would not…

it was about the ‘utterly meaningless’ comment. Not about the external reputation system which is a perfectly fine thing to advocate for. But… it may have been overbearing so i deleted the comment.

I guess i just feel like the external reputation system is very specific and complex, and would be better off with a feature request (not that Tony has to delete the post here). We are still figuring out forum etiquette though so maybe i’m off here.

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@sgene the iNat team has not really considered an external reputation system, wherein an established expert of a taxon can be new to iNat and their IDs “count” more than someone else’s but we are definitely exploring an internal one much as you described, based on one’s ID history on iNat. It is, however, a complex thing to bring into existence. Like Tony R. said, it probably won’t work as well for obscure taxa, but could help with things like students getting each other’s observations to Research Grade, vote brigading, etc.

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I sure wouldn’t be in favor of an external rep system fwiw. I won’t go through the whole speal again but how that works on other sites sounds awful.

One thing to bear in mind: this is a dynamic system. If we dramatically restrict the ability to bump observations up to research grade, instead of brigading, we’re probably going to get a lot more private msgs and pings asking the top people on the leaderboard to confirm things. IMO, putting in conflicting identifications to get a brigaded observation off of research grade has less overhead than written responses to messages, etc.

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I is unclear if this still belongs here: Nature Challenges and quality data.
Change the way data is taken into the system when a contest or nature challenge is created. The data is temporarily “quarantined” so members of the challenge can work out IDs using iNat tools and post their friends and give things goofy names: You know, all the things that make science fun. Make it so the general community can see and contribute as normal but the data in the Challenge que does not escape to the general database until some time after the event close. This way there is a period where the observations can be curated tossing the easy garbage out. That data that would be fit for inclusion in the general database if it were not miss identified at RG can be wiped clean to get out of quarantine. It would land as unknown on the community ID page starting the process over.

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@edLike I really like your suggestion.

With respect to the conversation abt identification accuracy rates, I’d really like to be able to generate reports abt my own. I’ve figured out how to do it on a very gross level, but it’s very laborious. and I don’t know how to filter by number of IDs. You can’t manage something if you can’t measure it…

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I’m going to close this request. I don’t think we’ll be making any changes to the way an individual user’s ID counts for the foreseeable future.

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