I’m noticing more and more folks are deleting their Inaturalist posts after experts all come in and identify their posted organism, often with detailed explanations about why said organisms are the species they are. Why delete the post?
I personally find it very helpful to read through the comments of these types of observations. It helps me learn to tell the difference between the two or even more than two species that look alike. I get corrected all of the time, and I appreciate people coming in and correcting my identifications, especially knowing that folks correcting my ID’s often give some helpful insight to why something is what it is and not that or the other.
I’ve been encountering people deleting their posts a lot lately, and I understand they have the right to. It’s just disappointing. It’s nothing to be ashamed of at all! I’ll never know and understand every lifeform on Earth and I proudly acknowledge that! I’ll never truely know everything about the things I’m supposed to be good at, either. Someone will always be there to teach me more about that, too.
Why pass up the opportunity to learn and teach others through your/my mistake?
I’ve seen this happen at least once. I imagine it mostly occurs in new users who feel like admitting they were wrong about an ID will make them look foolish so instead delete an observation to avoid any embarrassment.
That makes sense. Some folks, I imagine, use iNaturalist as a way to showcase their expertise about the natural world. If you are using iNat as a portfolio / showcase of your expertise, and then you are shown to have been incorrect about an ID on one of your own observations, that would be rather embarrassing, and not serve the very purpose that one has for having the account in the first place. So, for those particular users with those particular purposes for having an iNat account, your explanation makes sense.
I have to confess I’ve done this once after misidentifying some pine sap as a type of fungus and having someone perfectly politely point out my error. In my case, it was both because the subject (a splotch of white pine sap) was not actually an organism and because, quite frankly, I was kind of embarrassed. In hindsight, I do wish I’d left it up, if only as an example for others. If nothing else, I could have ID’d it as genus Pinus!
I can think of one particular user who I’ve seen multiple times post something with a wrong ID, be corrected, and delete and post again with the correct ID - which is an annoying waste of identifiers’ time but hard to do anything about since I can’t prove it’s happened (it’s going on my memory of ‘I saw this photo yesterday’). Other than that, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen, but if it were only being deleted, I don’t suppose I’d be likely to notice.
In terms of leaving wrong IDs just to keep it in the Similar Species tab, I can sort of see the value, but I think there are enough people who never respond that the tab is likely to stay populated anyway. Whereas leaving your ID may leave the observation at a higher level where it can get buried, plus it then requires three correct IDs to get to RG rather than only two, and may involve extra ‘move it in the right direction’ IDs in the process as well. As an identifier, I think the benefits of withdrawing wrong IDs far outweigh the benefits of keeping a record of possible misIDs.
(I admit that a pet peeve of mine is people who say ‘thanks!’ for a correcting ID… but leave their own incorrect ID up anyway. It feels like ‘if you’re really thankful, the least you could do would be to withdraw the wrong ID so (a) it will be more findable, and (b) we don’t need an extra identifier to overcome your ID’.)
Still seeking a tactful way to nudge people right for that. Your ‘thanks’ generates both notifications for previous identifiers and commenters, and maintains the need for extra identifiers to actively respond to the ‘right’ ID. Sigh.
Deleting a post with your incorrect ID and some explanation by someone correcting you is in my eyes bad manners,
Deleting a post and withdrawing an ID is not the same thing. It does happen that I have to withdraw my ID without being able to confirm the correct one. Absolutely no embarassement!
I don’t want to derail this conversation, but you can point them to this help page. Also keep in mind that it’s not possible to withdraw an ID in iNaturalist Classic for iOS, so some people may not know it’s even an option.
Not being able to withdraw in “Classic” always seemed weird.
I’ve only deleted my posts a few times, usually when it turned out not to be an organism, or it’s something I just don’t care about anymore (e.g. a plant I documented turned out to be planted/captive and was no longer useful data).
I’ve deleted a couple when I botched the initial ID, accidentally chose something totally inappropriate, and noticed it before the record attracted a lot of attention. If I just make a mistaken ID, I leave the observation in place and withdraw my ID.
Mistaken IDs feed the common misidentification page info for the species, so its useful to keep them in place. But if the original ID is not the form of mistake that other people would consistently make, and the observation hasn’t accrued a string of IDs or some useful commentary, I don’t see much benefit in keeping the record.
I just started and I did delete one yesterday. I used an ID suggested by the app, so not my own ID. I wasn’t sure if I should change it (or really how to change it) or delete it - just exploring the app at this point, so didn’t think it would be a problem either way.
On a side note, if the app misidentifies an organism, does it learn if the identification is corrected? That would be one good reason to not delete it, if leaving it helps to improve the app identifications. I can ID native plants myself, but I’m no bee expert.
But the ID appears with your name attached to it. The CV suggests, but it is up to you to evaluate and agree. Or not.
tiwane has a link to – How to withdraw your ID – in his comment above.
Is hitting the “Agree” button in Classic not the same at withdrawing ID? I exclusively use Classic and thought I had been withdrawing IDs, but now I’m worried I’m part of the problem ^^;
At least on the web version of iNat, you can go to your incorrect ID in the observation, click on the down arrow, then on Edit, then on Delete to make your ID disappear. I’ve done that a few times when I submitted a dumb ID and didn’t want to leave it visible with a strikethrough.
