If I update an observation with a new ID that disagrees with the previous ID, it is not labelled as a disagreement.
Adding a higher level disagreement is momentarily labeled as a disagreement with Unknown, but once the observation is re-indexed it goes away!
Restoring the original ID also momentarily labels the second ID as a disagreement with finer identifications.
This is relatively new because it didn’t use to happen.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/27516158
But it was happening a few months ago (unless some got reverted retroactively) and I just noticed it so I’m not sure when it started.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/62767966
Perhaps it happens because disagreements with inactive IDs don’t exactly make sense, especially when one ID is withdrawn and another is implemented simultaneously—there was never actually a disagreement. But it’s still helpful to have them labelled (as they used to be).
Using Chrome on a Mac
I think it is intentional? I do withdraw previous id cause I don’t like to see that line about something that was a missclick or was up for a couple of minutes before I realise my mistake, I think if you leave the previous id up without deleting it, it’s quite clear you disagree with it.
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I wondered if it might be intentional. In these cases it’s obvious that there would be a disagreement, as you can’t have different genera that don’t conflict. But in my second and third example above, it would be helpful to have a disagreement displayed showing whether or not I thought it could be the lower level taxon. There’s no way for another user to know if I was explicitly disagreeing or just unsure. And I shouldn’t get the pop-up prompt if the result doesn’t show up at all. Moreover, if you’re adding an ID from a different taxon level, you won’t know it’s a disagreement unless you’re familiar with the taxonomy of that group. I only know this is a disagreement because I know that Isognomon isn’t in Pteriidae.
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I struck similar issues recently… have a look at the community ID explanation panel to see if it is still registering it as a disagreement (would probably count as implicit rather than explicit)
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My IDs are the only ones on these observations, so there is no Community ID. If I change my ID on a separate observation then there is a disagreement because there is someone else’s ID to disagree with.
What is more interesting is to look at what happens here, where I am disagreeing with my original ID.
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I’ve run into a variation of this recently, shown here.
When I replaced my species-level ID with a genus-level ID (same genus), I did not get the “Do you explicitly disagree?” dialog box, but I think I should have.
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I think no, because the community ID at that time was genus, not species.
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But if you had withdrawn and then added a genus ID in two steps, you would have had the opportunity to disagree with T. granulosa.
Interesting. It seems like I wasn’t given the opportunity to distinguish between the two possible meanings of my choice, which seems independent of the current community ID. But I guess that’s not how it works.
OK, that definitely seems like an inconsistency in the system.
Your observation ID would have been at genus level, so in essence you were agreeing with that ID and not disagreeing with anything, even if your previous ID was finer. If you had been in Identify and pressed the agree hotkey it would have put up a genus level ID. But if you withdraw your ID first, the observation ID becomes T. granulosa and then you can have the option to disagree with that or not.
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I understand that, but there’s another way to look at it that makes more sense to me: Changing my ID means removing the old ID and adding a new ID. It shouldn’t matter whether those two things are done at the same time or a few seconds apart. The start point is the same and the end point is the same, so the behavior should be the same.
Yeah that definitely makes sense. It’s hard for me to know exactly how disagreements work when it’s not just my IDs though. The whole observation ID and community ID thing makes it a bit more complicated. And I suppose that to a computer, things don’t ever happen at exactly the same time.
I agree that it’s hard to understand either what it is actually doing or what it should be doing. In my case, it is implicitly using my old ID (via its effect on the old community ID) when deciding how to process my new ID, but since I (obviously) am removing the old ID, I don’t think it should be taken into account in any way when evaluating my new ID. But it all makes my brain hurt a little.
