I’ve seen that too. I try to give credit to observer by remarking in my identification something along the lines of: Observer identified specimen as “xyz”, typos and all.
Can they withdraw their ID? If they are using the app on an iPhone, there is no withdraw option, the id has to be replaced with another ID.
Sorry for joining this conversation so late but when I saw your post just now I thought of a funny thing that happened a couple of weeks ago. I often try and id a few ‘unknown’ observations each day if I can, but this is mushroom season down under so there’s a lot of mushrooms that people post every day as ‘unknown’. I don’t know much about mushrooms, so I id them as “fungi” to get the process started.
One of the users who had uploaded mushroom pictures as unknown (he had only posted a handful of observations to date) commented “of COURSE it is a fungus - what else can it be”!
So clearly the guy had an understanding of the bigger picture but lacked the knowledge of how iNat works.
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Happens a lot! Folks near me ( I watch my county) keep making posts of “Something” which is just as useless as “Unknown”. I’d love to comment “Of course it’s Something! “ but so far, have been able to refrain!
Just keep IDing!
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This is one of my biggest pet peeves on iNaturalist.
The admins really should implement some kind of mandatory basic “Is this obviously a plant or animal?” system. This would massively reduce the “unknown” obs (birds and flowering plants alone are typically about 50% of “unknown” obs). And for people that don’t want to ID their uploads, there is always the option to let the computer do its best. Even if the system just automatically classified every single blank ob as Angiospermae, that would still significantly improve the unknown problem, because someone is going to see the organism and tell us what it’s not. Anything is more desirable than millions of common birds and trees at “unknown” status clogging up the system and interfering with the identification of true unknowns.
Most of these are clearly just a heron someone saw at the local park or a photo of someone’s grandmother’s prayer plant. This actively interferes with specialists IDing less-studied taxa. Personally, I tend to ID organisms like sponges that most people can’t figure out to even kingdom level. These truly belong in the unknown category. An oak tree or cardinal in someone’s back yard does not.
An initial ID to even obvious kingdom level, even if it’s wrong, almost guarantees an eventual ID to at least family level - and often quickly, typically within just hours to days. However, I see sponges literally all the time that someone just recently ID’d to phylum level that had been totally unidentified for years, sometimes nearly a decade. The contrast is so stark it’s shocking.
Were it not for the way uploads are currently allowed to be added without a classification of any kind, I could actively search the unknowns and find quite a good number of the unusual organisms I’m looking for, but as it is at the moment, that’s a pointless endeavor for most identifiers and many people, including myself avoid the “unknown” for this very reason.
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I agree. I think that seems simple enough, is there perhaps some other reason that feature can’t be easily programmed into iNaturalist’s code? Otherwise I feel that would already be a feature. IDK, I’m oblivious to most of the things that coding is about.
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I mean other apps already do it, as demonstrated in this thread. Like I suggested, even just having the system auto-ID things as Angiosperms or “Animal” as the default for all uncategorized obs is better than leaving them blank because it means people will quickly notice them. It has to be a taxon lower than “Life” for that to work though. Things left at “unknown” can go totally ignored for years on end. And there are millions of these. Personally, I don’t think users should be allowed to mass upload obs without giving any category. Most of the species users doing this are uploading appear to be common plants, birds and insects anyway. For rarer species - where iNaturalist is an actually useful scientific tool for registering real-world species ranges with photographic evidence better than most papers - this is disadvantageous.
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No, thank you. Autodumping in plants, simply moves the problem to a different basket.
I am one of the people who chose to sort thru Unknowns. Targeting them on to the relevant taxon specialists.
iNat is first, social media, encouraging I naturalist, not I scientist, to engage with nature. The ensuing engagement and discussion is a learning curve for some of us - which pays the scientist’s input forward - if we can recognise the next one unaided.
If the automated ID is wrong, it will need 3 humans to overturn it.
PS some scientists chose to upload all their pictures, then work thru the IDs carefully going forward. That workflow also has to be accomodated.
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Don’t know if this is a sponge, but it is odd. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/127782332 (I’ve been IDing unknowns this morning.)
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are there freshwater sponges?
Yes, there are. Not many of them.
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It could be CV based – say the CV is “pretty sure” this is a Vaccinium, then dump it in dicots. That would help, wouldn’t it? Although there would be sooo many wrong observations of mammals, since beavers seem to be the go-to suggestion for tree+water 
I would like some kind of system where the computer would automatically apply an ID that would then be automatically withdrawn after any human adds an ID. Just a temporary ID for sorting purposes.
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Is there a project to accumulate observations with multiple species, ones that should be split? There was some talk about this once, and my foray into unknowns keeps showing them.
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PS we have a species 
I used the CV then kept calling in help, help, help.
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Really not. We have a bug. CV is pretty sure it is … then it’s best suggestion on the list is something quite other. CV is still battling with - That species doesn’t occur here.
Dumped in dicots is moving the Needs ID from basket 1 to basket 2. Doesn’t help.
Surely dicots is better than unknown? Then we wouldn’t have to sift through “a beetle maybe?”, “some kind of winged insect”, “I don’t even know where to begin with this one” and could go straight to “wait, I should know this one, but I’ll have to leave it at dicots” ;)
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38K to start with? But I have the Unknowns down to the last thousand and finding fascinating biodiversity!
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=10&iconic_taxa=unknown%2CPlantae&order_by=observed_on&place_id=97392&project_id=123926&taxon_id=47126&lrank=family
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I probably moved half of the unknowns I went through to “Dicots.” At least the animal people won’t have to deal with them. I was kind of surprised to find some easy-to-ID organisms in Unknown from a year a more ago. Felt sorry for people who had been waiting that long. Sigh. But we do our best.
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We used to sometimes hear staff talk about an upcoming improved onboarding for new users. But, it seems not to be progressing since the Covid staff reductions
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