Gamify accuracy? Award value to quality, not just quantity

As you would already know, I’ve already made a comment in the “overzealous identification” topic about this:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/overzealous-identification/5975/27

Personally though, I haven’t had too many problems that would be solved by “gamifying accuracy”. Accuracy problems usually occur in lesser known taxa, by people who think they are being accurate. They’re not usually caused by leaderboard chasers. On the flip side, the biggest issue I have with those people is the occasional 500+ notification spam when someone wakes up one day and decides they want to be #1 for a particular taxon.

I am in favour of a better way to rank identifiers though, if for no better reason than to help people work out who has the required knowledge. To that end though, I don’t care what their credentials are. So long as you can accurately identify an organism and want to be the #1 ranked identifier (by whatever metric), who cares if you’re a global authority on orcas, or if you’ve just watched Free Willy a few times?

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