Darwin and Wallace on iNat

Curators
1

Credit where credit is due. As far as i understand Gbif credits the first species level identifier on iNat (unless it is the observer itself) as the identifier of an observation.

A not very hypothetical story:

A regular iNat user figures out the species level identification of a iNat observation. As the species name is not available he tags the genus and requests that the name is made available on iNat.

A moderator reacts to this request and asks for the relevant observations, before adding the names.

The user links the observations he wants to identify with the still not available name to the flag, to support the request for the new names.

After recieving links to the observations, the moderator adds the names to iNat and immediately identifies the observations the user has linked to the flag. Thereby the moderator becomes the identifier credited by gbif.

Just asking, what is your opinion?

2

If it takes 2 IDs to become Research Grade, then if we were worried about full documentation, we should have GBIF record both of those first two identifiers (or more, if there was a major disagreement)?

3

When I see that someone is adding an ID as a comment because the species is missing in the database, I add the species to the database and inform the identifier with a @tag, but I never add the identification (unless I would be confident about it, but usually it is not a taxon I am very familiar with).

I also think the issue is not overly important (I wasn’t even aware that iNat users are visible on GBIF as identifiers).

4

I didn’t know identifiers got this credit on GBIF, and am happy to know (although sure, ideally it would be more than one name). If the curator can independently identify the taxon, this seems ok, although I prefer the approach notiophilus described.

5

It hadn’t occurred to me in nine years of using iNat that there was any real kudos to be gained by being the first identifier of an observation. Sure, iNat classifies IDs as Improving, Leading, Supporting, and Maverick, but this categorization doesn’t really have any consequences.

I checked on GBIF records and I do see the behavior you mentioned: GBIF’s “Identified by” field appears to show the name of the first iNat user to suggest the taxon that has RG-level support. Apparently, I have done this 9,406 times.

I think those data just need to be interpreted in the context in which they were created. Almost always, the first correct ID on an iNat observation corresponds to the person who was actually first to identify the organism. In your edge case, the taxon name doesn’t yet exist and the identifier has to ask a curator for assistance. I would assume that a curator adding the taxon name and immediately adding IDs was just motivated to be helpful, not to steal glory from the original identifier. If identification priority is important, maybe the curator should wait before adding IDs, but the sequence of events should be clear from comments and flags even so.

7

Like others have said, this is the first time I’m hearing that it matters who makes the first ID, even after >100,000 IDs on iNaturalist. I have a feeling that many people have not been paying attention to this.

8

It just doesn’t matter to me who is listed as the IDer on GBIF. Getting my name listed on GBIF isn’t why I identify (and I have worked with GBIF data enough to know that this seems to be how they add the IDer field). The situation presented above (a taxon being created and then IDed by someone who didn’t suggest the taxon creation) seems like it would be a vanishingly small proportion of iNat IDs. The GBIF system as described seems like a reasonable one on the whole - there’s no way that GBIF would be able to account for the situation described above.

9

Why does it matter who is cited as the identifier on GBIF?

10

darwin and wallace were fans of each others work. an implication that darwin took credit for wallace’s work suggests a lack of knowledge on the subject.
this is off-topic, the thread title just rubs me the wrong way.

11

Well people spend hours and hours on computers and phones, playing, to get symbolic tokens. iNaturalist seems to exploit this behaviour by providing numbers and charts and honoring identifiers and observers…

The question i am asking is whether it is ok for iNat curators, to use the difference in power to snatch a symbolic form of recognition from a regular user.

If it really doesn’t matter who is mentioned in GBIF, then why would a iNat curator snatch that place?

Clearly the mayority of iNat curators behave different as mentioned above by @notiophilus
I am also not aiming to change something that has already happened in the past. All i want is a discussion about this case and maybe a adaption of the guidlines for curators concerning the future.

12

Agreed, a better title would be Wallace and Groomit.

13

I suppose that’s a valid point, although I doubt many people even know that GFIB provides such credit.

14

Just as a reminder, we are asked to assume that other users mean well, which describing this situation as

does not.

Many iNat users, including curators, are likely totally unaware that GBIF would count them as the identifier for an observation (as evidenced by other comments on this thread). I think it would be a very rare motivation in an already very rare occurrence that a curator would be adding an ID in this situation in some type of underhanded way or with bad intentions. It’s much more likely that they are adding an ID because they like IDing, want to be helpful, or any of the other common reasons why users on iNat provide IDs for other people.

15

Sometimes when I can tell that the person requesting the species isn’t very familiar with how iNat curation works (e.g. I see frustration in the comments that the species isn’t available, and they don’t know that they can request it) then I’ll add the ID and then withdraw it immediately. That makes it super clear that the ID is now available, but I’m not going to show up as a top identifier for an obscure species that I have no knowledge about. Mainly so people don’t tag me about the species in the future.

16

Well the case i experienced was different. I had flagged a genus with the request to add several species for a geographical area. The moderator asked in the flag for the observations of these species, and i provided links to 6 observations in 3 species. The moderator than added the 3 species names and identified all 6 observations in agreement with the information provided by me.
He did not add another name in the same genus i had also requested. ( i had told the moderator that there is no iNat observation of this taxon until now) … then he closed the flag without adding the name without observations.
That means in case i find an observation of the remaining species, i have to open a new flag, getting probably helped by the same moderator again, just to repeat the game?

17

I think I found the flag and discussion that you’re referring to, but even if I have the wrong one, the points below should still be valid.

iNat guidance on requests for new taxa does recommend that curators add taxa that are requested individually (rather than a large batch) and only where there are iNat observations on iNat. I’m pretty sure the curator’s request for details of observations was based on trying to follow that policy.

Similarly, I would be fairly confident that the curator declined to add that one name simply because there wasn’t an observation for it and so it didn’t meet the guidance. Opinions vary on this, and personally I don’t see much reason to wait until there is an observation before a taxon is added. I think this is something of a relic of iNat’s early days, although I might not be enthusiastic about adding dozens of species for which there are no plausible observations simply because someone found them in a checklist.

It seems very unlikely that the curator intentionally added IDs to the observations you listed in order to claim some kind of priority. Much more likely, after putting a little time into looking at POWO and other sources to validate adding the new taxa, they felt it would be useful to add IDs for the relevant observations, without any intention to “scoop” your own IDs. If my assumption is correct about the iNat user involved, then I’m pretty certain there was no ill intent, as I have worked cordially with them on a bunch of taxa over several years.

As others have said, it’s really important to assume that others mean well. We all come across perplexing actions on iNat, and while a few of them may really be bad behavior, many more of them are just misunderstandings, especially at this level of detail.

If you feel it’s important to have your name on the first ID for these observations so that it shows up on GBIF, I guess you could ask the curator whether they would withdraw their IDs and then re-add them. That probably wouldn’t be important to me, but I also wouldn’t have a problem accommodating that request from someone else.

It’s great that you’re interested in tackling the taxonomy of plants on Hispaniola and I wonder whether it might be more efficient to do that as a curator yourself? Of course, there are a bunch of policies and rules that we curators have to abide by, but if you feel you can accept those, you might want to request curator access. That might make a lot more sense than making flags to request others to add many taxa. I would caution that curators definitely need to take a collaborative approach, but if you accept that, then iNat could benefit from your contributions.

18

That doesn’t sound like the curators are trying to get credit for IDs. It sounds like they’re trying to be helpful. What we want is for IDs to be made, after all- it isn’t a contest of who gets the most first ones.
I know I certainly don’t care who IDed something first, not least as it doesn’t make them any more likely to be correct.
INat isn’t ‘exploiting’ anything. The existence of charts and statistics on the site isn’t to manipulate people into playing some kind of game, it’s because people enjoy having those things as part of something they’re already doing. You aren’t playing one of those mobile games that wants as much of your time and money as possible, you’re participating in a scientific endeavor.

19

The only person who can tell you what this person’s motivations and goals were is the person in question. I don’t think it’s productive to ask others to publicly speculate on their motives. I recommend asking the person directly. Anything else is just speculation.

Most of this is stats-based and a way to organize data and display data, as well as a way to make it useful (i.e. it’s often useful to know who the busiest identifiers of a taxon or an area are). Some people do take it seriously and competitively, but the site doesn’t do much to emphasize it. If iNat really wanted to juice this kind of stuff, we’d be adding badges, rewards, animations, algorithmic newsfeeds, etc etc, but that’s something we’ve resisted despite many requests for that kind of functionality.

Just to clarify, that page is only a few years old so it’s pretty recent. I didn’t write it, but I think the main intentions are to not increase the database size and complexity with a bunch of empty nodes and (maybe) to have curators spend their time focusing on what’s currently needed.

20

Thanks for the clarification @tiwane. I would agree that there’s not much value in adding a bunch of unobserved taxa to iNat solely because they’re listed on POWO or another authority. However, if I’m putting in the work to revise iNat’s coverage of a genus, I have no qualms about adding taxa for a small number of accepted species in a genus even if they haven’t yet been observed.

By the point that I’ve put in many hours to understand the current state of accepted species for the genus, there’s no sense in waiting to add a small number of species one by one when I can tie each to a specific observation. I would prefer to be able to wrap up treatment of taxonomy for that genus and move on to spend time focusing on the next thing that’s needed.

21

Maybe a silly question, but what (if anything) is the “identified by” field on a GBIF record pulled from iNat ever used for? This is the first time I’ve noticed that field, and based on a bit of browsing it looks like it just pulls a username from iNat, which frequently isn’t even related to the identifier’s actual name (stuff like Bug_Guy or PlantLover1967 or Hippy_Dude50 or the like…) The only way to see who these pseudonymous identifiers even are is to click the link to the iNat observation and check the profiles, at which point you can see all the IDs anyway, and the “first identifier” doesn’t hold any special place. I can’t imagine a scientific publication specifically citing the expertise of an “identifier” based on this data field alone. I assume I have my username on a bunch of GBIF records at this point since I identify a lot- does this mean somewhere out there I’m being cited via my username in some publications? If not, I can’t see why anyone would alter their behavior to try to get their username to show up in this field.