Several of my DQA votes on whether the ID can be improved or not have completely disappeared without trace and I do not know why. I was wondering if this was related to the recent proposed changes to how subspecies work but I can’t find any reference to it so I am presuming it is a bug.
In all of these cases the observer has added an initial ID of species, and then I have added a subspecies ID and checked ‘yes’ to ‘can the community taxon be improved’, because it can indeed still be improved. An hour or so later I have a notification from the observer of an agreeing ID etc., so I go to remove my vote and it has completely disappeared. So far it has happened with half a dozen sightings - I originally thought I had simply failed to hit the button but it has happened since then on sightings that I double-checked. Retracting or deleting my initial ID does nothing (as expected).
Ah I see, thanks! It did seem intentional. However, there’s still a bug here - if someone doesn’t like that someone has voted on their observation, they can simply add an ID that changes the community taxon and then delete/retract the ID, and the voting gets completely reset. Seems like an oversight that could easily be abused, and nobody gets any notifications when the voting is reset.
That’s true, but if it’s just one vote, they can also just vote against you. I’ve had that happen when I’ve marked things cultivated (like street trees) that someone either wanted identified or to count as one of their research grade observations. There’s also the option to delete and repost the observation if someone isn’t happy with their IDs.
Just one section of that DQA shows as greyed out for me, the “Can the Community Taxon be improved?” query. And I think this may be because it is at species level but needs confirmation to reach RG? This is just a guess, though.
To support this supposition, here is one of my own recent Observations, currently at species level but needing a confirmation. There are no other further suggestions for identifications by others, yet the same section of the DQA is greyed out (for me, at least).
It’s greyed out because the CID is genus, but there is one species ID. The system treats that as an implicit “yes” to “can it be improved” – at least one person thinks it can, so “clearly” (according to the system) it can be improved and you don’t need a vote.
I think in the majority of cases you’re right, it’s not a problem. But in any case where a single person’s identification can change the community ID (I think most commonly this would be when there are only two identifications at the finest ID level), anyone can completely erase the votes without any notification to anybody else. Based on the observations I regularly review, that sort of situation comes up much more frequently than you might think.
Hard disagree with this logic. Even if there is an implicit “It can be improved” implied in the lower level ID, it doesn’t mean that other IDers shouldn’t be able to cast a dissenting vote - just that they’d need two to “overrule”. These recent changes have tilted the balance of IDing even more towards users offering speculative/leading IDs. I really wanted the OID exported to GBIF problem fixed, but at this point, I think the cure is worse than the disease.
I agree with @cthawley here - although there’s certainly an implicit ‘yes this ID can be improved’ from the person with the new ID, this shouldn’t stop others from disagreeing with this in the DQA. Other than in situations where the community taxon doesn’t exist (i.e. when there is only one ID), I don’t see any reason why it should be greyed out.
But can’t you (and shouldn’t you?) add a disagreeing genus level ID to bump the OID to genus, then check that DQA box? If you think the ID can’t be improved from the genus level doesn’t that mean you disagree with the species level ID?
This is connected with the recent change that prevents observations from becoming RG if the observation taxon and the community taxon are not the same. The previous system had meant that the DQA could make observations RG with only a single species level ID (observation taxon) that was treated for all practical purposes as though it were the community taxon.
The “solution” was to make observations casual if the DQA was applied in such cases. To prevent observations from unnecessarily becoming casual, the DQA button was subsequently disabled for observations when the community taxon and observation taxon are not the same.
Note that this only applies at the point in time the DQA button is clicked: it is still possible for users to add a more specific ID on observations where the DQA has already been used. In such a case, the DQA is not erased (because the community ID has not changed), and the observation becomes casual.
As I said above, I think this change tilts the balance unnecessarily in favor of IDers who are willing to make speculative/leading IDs. In this situation, 4 IDers, including several of the most frequent/expert IDers of the genus and the observer, IDed to genus level and then at least one ticked “as good as can be”. That’s a pretty strong consensus that the observation is best IDed to the genus level and a lot of IDer attention/effort.
One leading/more specific ID here (and I’m not criticizing the IDer, just the scenario) adding a more specific ID essentially wipes out all that previous ID effort (changes OID and removes DQA votes). Then, a previous IDer needs to see the notification of a finer ID (already dicey with high volume IDers), return to the observation, add another ID (a disagreeing one which happens to be the same as their original ID and doesn’t change the CID at all) and then tick the same DQA that they had already ticked (but was deleted). This is not an efficient system for IDers to use and quite demotivating.
I would also note that in this situation, allowing use of the DQA would not result in the observation
The observation would have remained at RG at the genus level.
I do understand that
and I was one of the users thoroughly opposed to that who mentioned the issue across multiple forum posts in the hope that it would be changed. However, I’ll repeat my statement from my earlier post:
yes but then it sounds like the issue is with the DQA votes being erased (a change I have mixed feeling about too) not with the box being grayed out when the CID doesn’t match the OID (a change I think was a strict improvement).
This is not true. The box is only disabled when the CID doesn’t match the OID. Before this box was disabled in this case, selecting “No” on “Can the CID be improved” would immediately make such an obs casual.
the fundamental issue is that “Can be improved?” operates at the observation level, and it theoretically refers to the community taxon, BUT the community taxon is not static and can change with any addition / removal of identifications.
as long as this still operates at the observation level, there will always be problems. all these little changes will just continue to trade one frustration for another, as long as the fundamental issue is not addressed.
That was the behavior for a while, yes. However when iNat rolled out the changes to how the quality grade of infraspecific IDs are handled they added the rule that any obs whose CID does not match its OID cannot be made research grade. Whether this change was good or not is another discussion. However a consequence of this was that anytime you checked “No, it cannot be improved” on an obs where the OID and CID did not match, it would immediately be rendered casual. So e.g. any obs with one family level ID and one refining genus level ID would have this behavior. This led to a flurry of “why is this obs casual’ posts here, which in turn led to them disabling the checkbox entirely in these cases.
This change seems to me a strict improvement to the behavior immediately before this change was made. If you run into one of these observations think the OID is correct and cannot be improved (the genus level ID in my example), agree with that ID, then you can check the box. If you think the CID is correct and cannot he improved, agree with that ID and explicitly disagree with the genus level one, then check the box.
According to the current system, the observation in question would not, because the community ID (genus) and the observation ID (species) are not the same. At present there is no option for the observation to become RG at genus level while the observation ID is at species.
Note that I am not suggesting that it is a good way to handle this. I very much think it is not and I have said so repeatedly. I was merely noting that disabling the DQA in such cases was introduced in an attempt to address some of the problems created by the new system.
Edit: Though I am a bit confused about what exactly triggers the DQA to be erased vs. staying and making the observation casual; is it possible this has changed in the last few days? I was looking at an observation with an essentially identical situation, where 8 days ago the observer added a species ID to an observation where the DQA had previously been used to make it RG at genus, and the observer’s new ID made the observation become casual without the previous DQA being erased.
