Give a Guess When You Reduce an ID to Casual

I agree that it is important for new users to get feedback and making their observations casual without an ID or an explanation is going to be disappointing for them and not help them to become better iNat users.

If I am looking at unknowns (I generally find my skills are better used in other ways), I do try to find at least one observation by that user where I can provide a fairly specific ID along with a “welcome to iNat” and some general feedback on using iNat (why it is better to upload with a general ID, please mark cultivated plants as not wild, etc.)

But there are plenty of cases where it seems likely that feedback will serve no meaningful purpose, because the user will not see or does not need it. For example:

  • the user created their account several months ago, either of their own violition or as part of a bioblitz/assignment, uploaded a few dozen observations, and has never been active since

  • the plant has a clearly visible tag or label, so the user does not really need an ID to tell them what it is

  • the user has already gotten feedback on multiple observations, and has not responded in any way or changed their behavior on future observations

The other difficulty with cultivated plants is that they are often exotic tropical plants or cultivars/hybrids and I am unlikely to know what they are. If I add a general ID, this is probably not much more useful to the observer than no ID at all, and once the observation is casual, it is much less likely to be looked at, so it may be a very long time before anyone refines my ID.

(The alternative – not marking as “captive/cultivated” until the observation has gotten an ID, strikes me as inappropriate, because all I am doing is making the observation someone else’s problem, and there is no reason to assume that the next person to look at it will be able to provide a better ID than I can. I fully support the proposal to stop lumping non-wild observations together with defective observations, but I also think the distinction between wild and non-wild is important to maintain, both for users of the data and for IDers, since expertise with local flora does not necessarily overlap with expertise with horticultural plants.)

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