I have deleted when someone IDs the plant rather than the virus on it. Virus was clearly my intent but they went for the plant. I’m watching the plant and will repost it. Of course it is likely to sit without ID since ID will be nearly impossible from a photo.
Sometimes people use that to mean “I don’t think this plant has a virus.” Assuming you had made your intent clear by IDing it broadly to “Viruses” they are saying, “No sign of a virus, just the plant.”
Bear in mind that what is ‘clearly your intent’ to you isn’t always as clear to others looking through a massive stack of observations without IDs and trying to get through them quickly. Adding a broad ID is much more likely to avoid someone misinterpreting your focus (though it does still happen if the subject is hard to spot) - but I if it does, I find most identifiers are happy to withdraw if you point out that they focussed on the wrong thing (or they may say that there’s no sign of a virus, whatever damage you’re seeing is caused by something else). Deleting and reposting is rarely necessary, and if you’re still uploading without ID, you’re risking the same thing happening again and wasting everyone’s time.
I use the delete function primarily when I’m zooming through IDs and I make a mistake in my haste. I’ll just go back and correctly ID it.
When I’m corrected, I usually withdraw to maintain a sort of “processing legacy” to show that there was a misidentification in the past. That information can always be relevant or helpful.
This thread is about deleting their entire obs, not only their ID.
More so that I didn’t have anything to add to the definite topic! I just thought I’d chime in an aspect I could!
I don’t think I’ve deleted an iNat observation for anything other than an error regarding photos or location!
I did this quite a few times when I thought it was frowned upon. And those never had commented descriptions in the ids. I was also in the frame of mind of having a list of all unique, non multiples as challenge for myself. That went out the window pretty quickly and now I only upload when I think I have something new to me, or something I can’t id myself
With the scale of iNat you run into a lot of different kinds of people and see aspects of them that wouldn’t usually be obvious. Some people have very particular idiosyncratic ways of curating their Instagram profile so that it looks neat and tidy, but that doesn’t really stand out to most other people or affect them much. Whereas on iNat if someone is picky about how their observations look then it affects identifiers and any other members of the community who interact with the observation. I can imagine that if the aesthetically pedantic facet of my mind was stronger in a certain direction then I would be more bothered by conversational “clutter” on otherwise “clean” observations. iNat is meant to be more a collective dataset than a personal annotated photo gallery but the platform is flexible enough that it isn’t clear if they shouldn’t be using it that way (I think many of us use it as a mix of both anyways).