This is a request for having guides back. If there is enough support, perhaps we can take it to a feature request.
This is a reply from another conversation -
“Guides is a failed experiment that ran out of funding long ago. There doesn’t seem much point in trying to update it, since the same information can be easily found elsewhere on iNaturalist. A “Guide” is actually just a filtered photo-gallery of species, with each entry given a very brief summary plus a collection of links to some external resources. This is more or less equivalent to the species view of the observations page, with the summary and links being provided by the About tab on the Taxon page. The latter approach seems vastly superior to the Guides, since it provides complete coverage and does not require any extra maintenance.”
I think this perception overlooks what Guides can do. They store all info in one place, have customisable data, can be filtered as per characteristics of species and much more. This is a powerhouse.
So let’s do something. Starting today we all (whoever is interested) will pick up some taxon of our interests and then we make a guide on it. The guide should be able to differentiate species, by use of filters. All species, in one place, and we will add as much data as possible. OG descriptions, type locality, what not. This will be the proof that guides can do what we expect from them. This is a chance to get them back.
For me guides are more useful as a location based thing rather than a taxon based thing, and for the most part that is also accomplished by an area selection.
Except for when you’re looking for polyphyletic groupings in a place, like ‘mangroves’ or ‘lichen’.
It’s a reasonably accurate description of the large majority of existing guides. I only looked at a few dozen examples, but every one of them was just a localised list of taxa with each entry having only the default minimal Wikipedia summary/links. This is why I think it’s fair to say it’s a failed experiment: most of the actual guides that have been created don’t provide anything that isn’t already provided elsewhere on the site. They could do - but they don’t.
Nothing has gone away. There are no plans to delete the existing guides, and it’s still possible to create new ones. For anyone interested, see this tutorial on the forum:
It would be extremely helpful if you provided links to some of the guides you have created yourself. The best way to argue your case is to lead by example.
Still a work in progress. I’m not actually familiar with the jargon used for snail shell shapes so I can’t verify if the tags are actually helpful (except for the color and status tags). The guide does work for having a bunch of images and descriptions in one place though, and the idea is to expand it until the title is accurate (which means adding a lot more genera and >150 species total).
I agree wholeheartedly, unless the taxon guide includes sections for location-specific comparisons and differences.
I use birdsoftheworld.org extensively for bird ID information, and most of the ID “tips” for distinguishing from similar species will compare them with others in the USA if the species happens to exist anywhere in there (Since I live in south america, that happens often), even if the bird has a much, MUCH more similar species covering most of its range but not USA.
That said, I have seen very useful guides made by users that simply post them as Journal entries, such as That_bug_guy’s amazing guide to identify mule ducks (Mallard x muscovy hybrids).
A place to centralize that information would be useful, and may not need as much support as a whole separate structure of the website
This looks a very useful form of identification aid.
If you click on dextral, the photos still show several sinistral shells and vice versa. Is this because some species can be either? If so, it might be worth splitting the category into three - always dextral, always sinistral, and inconsistent.
I do not know this genus well but to be honest, I believe what he has done is the best possible. The observer does not know whether the shell he has found can be both or is only of one kind. This helps a lot. He has done good work. If had more knowledge on shells, I would have helped him build it. I know how much support counts. I have been working on a massive guide recently but I had not support. No one. Even identifiers of my interest group who I had communication with - @ alexstach , @ kragikuak, @babaprata and a few others. I spent over a month compiling illustrations for this. 720 illustrations total. But no one contributed to making the illustrations. I want to make them a guide but again no one is there to help. If he could tell me about what these terms mean then I could have helped.
The idea is that if your unidentified shell is dextral, you click the dextral tag so that ONLY species which could be dextral appear, ruling out all of the sinistral only species. If there is a separate inconsistent tag (I would prefer “both” or “amphidromine” for such a tag name), your species could be in either of the dextral and “both” groups, and because of how iNat works the only way to do that is to look at both groups separately and then combine the list of possible species manually yourself (iNat does not support combining the tagged lists unfortunately).
EDIT: It is possible to look at both groups combined. I might add this “both” tag, I don’t know if I will though since the way to use it seems less obvious than “oh, my shell is this coiling so i click this”
You could actually technically help, because I’m actually not the one writing the descriptions myself. As mentioned above,
This is because the descriptions themselves are copypasted from other sources, and the images are taken on GBIF (some species need images from other sources though). I plan to make a normal person translation of the text in the future (if I can figure out what the terms mean) but for now the guide description has a list of sources for the descriptions (currently just one).
Some other stuff I plan to add (which will be stuff I write myself) is images from outside GBIF as well as the current status and distribution range of the extant species (most of the species are extinct). I’ll add those once all species descriptions in the genus are added. These data will require some extra research, but for the first genus Achatinella much of the available information is very easy to find, e.g. the latest census data:
I will help you then. Try to build an understanding of the terms. A little explanation on what things like turricate and ventricose etc. will be useful. I like to know the details and then build it based on understanding too. This helps in making notes on distinguishing species etc.
Most of the terms currently only appear in 1 species which is not a large enough sample size to find things out though, and I’m not sure if I have the time to pour through other literature to find the meaning of these words. I’ll probably start learning what the terms mean when I start adding species from other genera, which is probably very soon (only 9 taxa left to add for this first genus).
At least I know what ovate, oblong and striate means, convex vs concave whorls, sinistral vs dextral coiling and sutures with and without margins. (I should probably add tags for some of those, there are some tag classes which I neglected to add. I don’t know if I can add striate though since the vertical lines in images are difficult to tell apart, they are either striae or just growth lines)
The guides have actually stopped working the way they were meant to.
For instance, the ‘filters’ functionality that used to allow guides to work as matrix-based keys has totally broken. I had guides I made as matrix keys in the past and they no longer work. Selecting multiple options used to be an “AND” condition that would let you use it as a matrix key, but now it just results in an “OR” condition and doesn’t work as a matrix key: https://www.inaturalist.org/guides/4796?tags[]=form%3Dtree&tags[]=color%3Dpurple
Thanks for the feedback - I suspected something like this must be the case. I did try creating a new guide myself to see if it was still possible, but I obviously didn’t test all the options. This seems like a significant deal-breaker, as the ability to create multi-access keys is probably the only real USP of the guides. Another potential deal-breaker is that there seems to a be hard limit of 500 taxa per guide, according to this thread on the old iNaturalist Google Group:
This thread also includes an interesting reply from Scott Loarie that gives a little more background on why development of the guides was abandoned. It seems that the main focus has moved to dynamic content creation, which I suppose fits in with the recent Google grant to help improve species suggestions. This suggests that the only way for the guides to become fully functional again is if someone forks the code-base and then sets up and maintains their own guides-specific site completely separately from iNaturalist.
Huh, thanks for letting me know in advance. I guess I’ll have to split my guide into two parts, for the large snails and microsnails then…
These changes really need to be fixed though, I can see this 500 limit and the tag bugs being a real dealbreaker for other people. The tags being an OR and not an AND is also really annoying for me but it’s too late to change from the guide to a different format so I guess I’ll just have to deal with it.
No. I found out that if you hover on a second option the you can see a green button with a “+” sign on it. When you press that button, it will add the corresponding option with the “and” logic.