Don't use computer vision

[bouteloua]

@acertsuga

I’m curious regarding the decision to have just geographic description rather than more specific ID advice in an app that seems to be about IDing stuff?

Hi @acertsuga, welcome to the iNat Forum! Are you referring to the little blurbs like this?

iNaturalist just pulls the About blurbs from the first paragraph on the associated Wikipedia article, which is freely editable by anyone. Sometimes I expand these articles with useful tips about distinguishing the species from similar ones - there’s more discussion about this here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inaturalist-and-wikipedia/2680

It’s definitely commonly requested that iNat have more identification tips built in / compiled from comments somehow. For now, those tips are pretty much restricted to people providing them in comments, writing about them in journal posts or guides, or linking to content elsewhere (like Wikipedia). In the 2019 team retreat, the staff discussed this, noting in their summary:

@tiwane

• Investigate ways to capture comments and ID remarks that are useful for making identifications and including them on the taxon page and in identification tools.

See some previous discussions for more:

• Adding useful ID info to taxon pages
• Add Comments or Wiki-Like Functionality on Taxa Pages to Discuss Identification and Other Relevant Issues
• Add an interactive system to glean diagnostic features from identifiers and show them to observers