many good suggestions above. So, let me just toss out my takeaways from the most recent City Nature Challenge in Penang … This was from all accounts I can discern a total disaster.
Problem: many of these brand new accounts posted 100+ observations that single day, now while I take pride in a good species century myself, I also typically get 95% of that century to RG within a few days, by taking good photos, and knowing what kinds of features lead to solid IDs in many classes of organisms. Expecting 100+ good observations of wild things from a new user is just not realistic.
Solution: limit uploads to 10-20 per day (they can take a week to upload if they choose
Solution: checksum limit photo resubmission, one potted cactus was loaded by one user 30 times, with 30 different IDs (one might even have been right?)
Problem: I think users were encouraged to try to get to the “top” of the ID standings. I saw several users that made several hunderd (400+) IDs that one day. Of course all were AI/CV assisted IDs, and (since the computer hasn’t seen anything in Penang before), they were all wrong
Solution: do not allow CNC challenges to even know their ID count no counting of IDs (that they can see), or Do not allow new users to place IDs deeper than order (yes, they even get Class IDs wrong (Dicots as Pinales, Pinales as ferns, etc)
Problem: After uploading those 100 obs in a day, or making those 400 IDs in a day, they have vanished from the site, now those in-the-wrong-class observations need to get the right class (bumps them to Tracheophyta or Animalia), so then the next 2 IDers have to be willing to troll through that huge set) and it takes 3 right votes to fix. It has been 3 weeks, of those 1500 IDs I’ve made on Penang, about 10 have had an ID of_any_type added after I made an ID, so unless I @ someone, they are dead observations.
Solution: See Two solutions above
In short, we gathered here are all in the business of sorting things into bins, that is taxonomy. The Penang observations amount to a very small quantity of gems needing to be sorted out of huge heap of trash (60,000) that we have allowed to be dumped upon us.
Solution: Try some: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=needs_id%2Cresearch&project_id=penang-intersecondary-school-city-nature-challenge-2019&captive=false
or this:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=needs_id%2Cresearch&place_id=132185&captive=false
and yes, even the butterflies on Penang, half are in a butterfly FARM !