I am greatly sympathetic to the idea behind the request – I would be less annoyed by mentions if more of them were actually relevant, but figuring out who can help with an observation is often quite tricky. I fear that @cthawley may be correct in the assessment that the proposal in its current form might not actually solve the problems with mentioning that it is intended to address. I’m not sure what a better solution would be.
To break down the problem, there are three, or maybe four, main ways that I see mentions being used:
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Observers who seek to solicit IDs for their observations within minutes of uploading by mentioning the top IDer or top several IDers, often using the leaderboard on the observation page rather than the leaderboard on the taxon page for their region.
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Observers who thoughtfully ask for help from a particular IDer for an observation that is unusual, that they have tried to ID themselves, or that they know based on past interactions that the IDer is likely to be interested in.
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Getting the attention of a user who has already interacted with the observation but may not be following it or may have unsubscribed to certain types of notifications (for example, to request that they take another look at their ID or to ask a question)
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IDers using mentioning to collaborate with other taxon specialists (help correcting a wrong ID, getting another opinion on a tricky observation one is not sure about, etc.)
I greatly dislike the first type of mentioning – I find that most of the time the observations are ones I cannot help with because they are outside my regional or taxon expertise, or they are common species that are likely to get ID’d fairly promptly anyway, or they are not IDable because the photo quality is poor and the observer does not know what to photograph. In addition, this indiscriminate use of mentioning always feels a bit pushy to me – as though the observer is too impatient to wait for someone to look at it as part of their usual workflow (like trying to cut to the front of the line). I also wish that observers would think about what would happen if everybody did this – the people at the top of leaderboards would be even more overwhelmed with notifications than they already are. It is counterproductive in the sense that IDers don’t need help finding observations to ID; most prolific IDers already have developed a workflow to try to effectively deal with the neverending pile of observations, so unnecessary and irrelevant mentions may actually waste their time. (It also creates a rather uncomfortable dilemma for those of us who have been socialized with certain expectations about politeness: such requests force us to choose between a) being rude by ignoring mentions or declining to help, or b) trying to encourage more thoughtful @-ing and suggesting that the observer wait a week or two instead of doing so immediately, which invariably seems to be interpreted by the observer as rude and out of line no matter how gently I try to phrase it.)
So I’d like to see some mechanism that would reduce this sort of mentioning. I’ve wondered sometimes whether a daily or weekly limit to how many times one can mention other users would be useful. Perhaps this would need to be restricted to one’s own observations and only include mentions of people who have not already interacted with the observation in which they are being mentioned. I suspect something like this might not be at all feasible from a programming standpoint, however.
At the same time, the fourth type (and second) type of mentioning is useful and an important tool for collaboration, and it seems like the proposal here could potentially help with that – provided that enough people fill out their profiles, which I fear might prove a significant hurdle.
I have often enough been in a position where I am looking at bee observations and find something that I can tell is notable but either I don’t know enough to confirm it myself or I need help from additional IDers to correct it. Because we are all generally rather overwhelmed, mentioning a relevant specialist is sometimes the only way to make sure that the interesting observations don’t become lost among the many many observations that can’t realistically be ID’d past genus. And even though I know who most of our bee people are, expertise often doesn’t follow neat categories (for bee genus A, ask user X), so it can still be rather challenging to figure out who is most likely to be able to help with any given observation, particularly given the limitations of the leaderboards outlined above. So something that would facilitate matching IDers to observations would be helpful. It isn’t about speed per se, but about reducing the guesswork and not having to click through dozens of observations to see who actually provided an ID for that species instead of a broader ID for the observation. I don’t know, maybe profiles aren’t the way to address this, and what would help instead would be a filter in the interface that would make it possible to find people who have made a particular ID that doesn’t involve looking up the relevant text snippet for URL manipulation and the taxon ID every single time.