Sorry! I thought I recalled reading that staff salaries/hours were reduced in 2020.
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There were temporary reductions in salary that affected us (and pretty much all of Cal Academy, for people who weren’t furloughed), but that didn’t affect the number of hours we worked.
Anyway, didn’t want to distract from the topic, just wanted to make sure there wasn’t confusion about that.
I belive the original main reasons (and these predate computer vision) for not forcing users to add an ID to an observation before submitting are:
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if they don’t have an internet connection, they wouldn’t be able to add an ID, impeding the obesrvation flow and perhaps confusing the user.
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we don’t want anyone to feel like they have to know anything about nature or taxonomy to make an observation.
IMO there are potential ways to address those (eg allowing someone to add an iconic taxon-level ID to an observation that will be applied even if they’re not online) but that’s some background on the why’s, which you certainly don’t have to agree with.
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To get back to the original question for a moment: I can see why anyone who works with little-known, hard-to-identify creatures like sponges, algae, the weirder fungi, what we used to call Protista, etc., would be seriously bothered by all the obvious animals, plants, and mushrooms that linger in “Unknown,” in the way. However, they don’t really bother me more than all the other “Needs ID” observations. They all need work.
Although requiring for an ID to kingdom (plant, animal, etc.) seems mindlessly simple to most of us, I suspect it would be off-putting to some of the total beginners who use iNaturalist. I would not support the idea.
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I’m not really ‘bothered’ by the unknowns, although maybe I should be. They are more like an invitation to play. Identifying on iNat can be a welcome means of procrastinating on other things, and the more unknowns there are, the bigger the temptation. I sometimes have to stop and remind myself that I really need to do other things.
I like to think of the process of sorting unknowns like those marble runs where you put a marble in at the top and it makes its way down past pins (kingdom, phylum, class, etc.) to fall into bins (species) at the bottom. Except, there are switches for each pin that let you control whether the marble falls and which way it goes towards its final destination, sort of like this example:
You see a pile of marbles (aka unknowns) and just want to pick up a handful and start them on their way so to speak and twist a few switches if you can. Every now and then you get feedback on whether you “won” or “lost” by someone refining or disagreeing with your IDs (there’s really no losing in this game though, you always learn more from disagreements). The whole process has the potential to be addictive. Other people play video games, some of us play sorting unknowns on iNat. ;-)
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Since this thread is getting really long, I’m not sure if this has been said or not. The one case where I don’t mind unknowns is when I’m browsing recent uploads and I know the species or subspecies, which might otherwise be misidentified by the CV and require multiple corrections.
In general, the consensus answer is clearly yes!
Doing that puts that observation in with all of the observations on iNat, with ID or not.
Except that your marble sorting game shows a classic normal distribution curve, which observations in need of ID do not.
I think those little levers (upside down T with nails) make it a non-normal distribution. If a marble goes left the first time, the lever forces the next one to go right. Here’s the probability breakdown per column, starting from top to bottom:
1/1
1/2 1/2
1/4 1/2 1/4
1/8 3/8 3/8 1/8
1/16 4/16 6/16 4/16 1/16
1/32 5/32 10/32 10/32 5/32 1/32
1/64 6/64 15/64 20/64 15/64 6/64 1/64
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Haha, well, for anyone interested in using this example for math exercises, here’s the website that I found the picture on, which has a couple more questions to answer for the curious: http://www.karlsims.com/marbles/
(I’m more thinking along the lines of an identifier being able to turn the levers to control which way the marble goes though rather than turning this into a probability problem.)
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Hi, yes it bothers me too.
I mostly chalk it up to laziness and/or misunderstanding of both the goal of iNaturalist and how to use it.
I view “Unknown” observations as being in virtual “trash bin”. Somtimes, I rummage through the “unknown” observations in my area and suggest a minimum level of ID to those that seem to me “worthy” of being pulled out of the trash bin. :-)
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Absolutely not a trash bin. Some have a different workflow - upload all their pictures, and come back later to ID. Some have internet or loadshedding (South Africa) problems.
We have a dedicated group of iNatters chewing away at the Unknown mountain! Come and stake your claim?
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I agree and I don’t really like all that talk about trash bins on iNat. Trash is something people throw away because they deem it unwanted or unusable. This does not seem to apply here. The amount of effort it takes to sign up for iNat and create an observation seems a far cry from dragging a file into the trash bin on your computer.
I also notice it is almost always directed at other people’s observations and/or photos. In our society today ‘trash’ has become a common derogatory term (e.g. used to describe people deemed worthless and low status). I suspect this is mostly a US cultural thing, so people from other places/cultures may not see it this way and inadvertently insult someone by using it. Here in the US describing something/someone as trash may come across as overly critical at best to personally insulting and provoking to the target.
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There’re clear trash observations, e.g. fully blank ones - no id, no time, no place; photos of the sky, people, random shots of something people accidentally uploaded.
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The records might not be “trash,” if that word is one we should avoid because it might be insulting, but there certainly are records that are more trouble than they are worth. A typical identifier probably calculates a cost:benefit ratio in their head when confronted with a problematic record and decides if it’s worth their time or not. If not, then it gets tossed aside and probably won’t ever have a useful ID. You can call it what you want. Personally if it looks like the observer spent less time on their record than I will trying to figure it out, it’s time for me to move on.
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I agree that there are observations and photos on iNat that don’t belong and should be deleted. If it’s something that was obviously uploaded by accident (such as an image of a person in a line-up of plant pictures), I find leaving a comment is usually appreciated by the observer. But that is different from calling an entire category (e.g. ‘unknowns’ or ‘casual’) a ‘trash bin’ that contains only unwanted stuff. If someone thinks that way and doesn’t want to look at it, they can, well, just not look at it. But I suspect the vast majority of observations in these categories are not there because the observer wanted to trash them.
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I’m trying to get unknowns in my county down to a kingdom at least; unfortunately many are plants or fungi which are totally alien to me.
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It’s hard but among the ‘trash’ there is absolute treasure. The more Unknowns you plough thru the more wonders you find <3
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It took me a while to learn that, but if it is too blurry … next.
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Part of that cost-benefit assessment for me is how many years I have left and how willing I am to spend time on any poor record.
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found this among the “trash” :-)
https://static.inaturalist.org/photos/227571796/original.jpeg
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