One of the reasons guides (either internal or as links) need to be improved in visibility is that things are easily lost in the vastness of the web, and websites disappear when people pass away, whereas if guides are proactively but discreetly fielded to inaturalist users it would provide a lot of incentive for people to make good guides, there’s rather less energy for making things that people are not likely to notice. At the moment iNaturalist guides are not picked up by a Google search and presumably other search engines, and they also need that.
Are guides useful? (I’m trying to see what others think). Choose:
- It has a good potential to be developed
- It is a good idea but not practically possible to improve
- It is possible to improve but not worth the effort
- It is useless, let it be “as is”
0
voters
“Good potential to be developed” – as follows:-
- They need to be properly linked in to observations by taxonomy and region and lightly pushed onto actual observations (a discreet link to view where present)
- They need to be presented on search engines (they aren’t on google, and presumably not others)
- wikipedia is no substitute for an inaturalist guide, not only due to the region-taxonomy linkability, but also because wikipedia doesn’t accept personal familiarity, only information in formal(ish) articles
- Encourage more custom guides (not the automatic gallery type)
- Include options to upload PDF as a guide, for which the above applies just as much
- Perhaps an upvoting system at some point (probably no rush until there are many)
- Multiuser editability (if not currently present I’m not sure), doesn’t need to be “live” collaboration, though it should keep an update counter so it can check when you save if it’s been altered since you loaded it or last saved
I would answer “I don’t know” because it was already considered a “dead feature” when I joined and consequently I never looked at them at all.
this was already discussed at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/guides-why-we-want-them-back/78021/
At least 3 of these 4 choices (not possible to improve, not worth the effort, and useless) would all imply a preference to leave them “as is”. But the phrase “let it be as is” is attached to the harsh criticism of “it is useless”, as if to deliberately drive votes for “let it be as is” away from the option that says “let it be as is”… A better set of choices might be “they are acceptable the way they are”, “we should invest in developing the feature again”, or “no preference”. Even “potential to be developed” could mean “more people should develop guides”, not “iNat staff ought to invest in changing the feature”. I suspect the most common answer would be “let it be as is” if the options weren’t clearly designed to avoid getting that result…
On a related note, should you give Paul Dennehy 10 dollars?
A) He’s terrible and doesn’t deserve it
B) He seems like an alright guy
You have to pick one.
The point is the way the options are worded in a survey can intentionally or unintentionally impact the answers you get. This is how every politician has their own survey results that seem to say they’re the most popular.
I’ve never found them useful. I suppose that’s in part because the implementation was never really very good, but it’s also because I can just select an area and look at what’s there. If I really need offline info I’ll just download the info.
I really do not understand. I has seen people use the work useless/not worth developing guides so I thought that that was the word I should use.
I meant staff also has to build this. remove that “as is” label.
Search “Pyrops” and you will find @psyllidhipster’s guide, “Asian Lanternflies: The genus Pyrops”.
Thanks, I were thinking of this too.
Of course not. I could never add my own understanding to Wikipedia. Published data is a big restriction,
What do you mean here? I would like to have more clarity.
How should this work?
It is there. I wish there was a version history visible to editors.
Pyrops guide - I did the search you suggested and it doesn’t come up for me, just a wiki article that opens in a similar way, probably derived from the About section of the Genus that comes from Wikipedia. Perhaps you can quote the search you are doing. I think if a link to a guide has been placed somewhere on the web google may pick it up.
Encourage more custom guides (not the automatic gallery type) - it’s what I remember when I glanced at them way back, a typical guide seems to be headed with a gallery of photos, I’ve not done guides because they are not linked in or very visible and there’s little point in creating guides with poor visibility. I will recheck to see.
Upload PDF as a guide - basically, iNaturalist or something like archiveorg stores your PDF (so it doesn’t disappear when you die like a personal website does), and as the above it would be linked in by taxonomy-region so that it is presented as a link. Instead of getting an html guide page, you would view a PDF.
Version history - I’m sure a version history could be done, perhaps the editor can have a button to make a snapshot to roll back to in case they change their mind about some changes they are doing.
For the other point, the voting questions seem straightforward to me.
I do not think that this would work actually.
What is your reasoning for why not… I’d have thought it would work very well.
I really could not understand what you meant. iNat is not a place to upload pdfs like archive if I understood right.
I mean instead of the iNat guide creator, if you create a PDF guide, you should be able to upload it as the guide, or if you place it on archiveorg, provide a link to it. Then it displays as a link in the appropriate places just like was mentioned.
That should be done on archive, since these pdfs are often heavy.
PDF isn’t about content, a PDF guide can be heavy or light, just as an iNaturalist guide can be. The main difference is with a PDF you have much more control over layout, such as being able to arrow things with labels.
I moved the above 15 posts to this topic, there was no need to start a new topic.
@aaravmishra I’m sorry but I don’t think Guides will be moved out of “as is”. There are plenty of options, however, to make your own resources, eg https://sites.google.com/view/flyguide
I know that’s the thinking, and maybe that will remain so, as I think it’s fair to say people seem to have made some good guides and you can just create a PDF to get more precise control and put it on the web, but I think that staticness is best viewed in terms of the “guide creation” element, since I think there’s plenty of scope to improve information being fielded to users on their observation in an intelligent way by being tied to taxon-geographicscope, information at the moment is just all lost on the web in a vast disorganised sea and never seen.
That’s a somewhat extreme exaggeration. Diligent searching will quite readily find many useful resources that are publicly accessible and free to download. Of course, there’s also a great deal of material that’s hidden behind paywalls or prohibitively expensive. However, even in those cases, there are often earlier editions available for free that can be brought up to date by augmenting them with more recent journal articles.
Personally, I would never rely on anything like iNaturalist Guides or Identification Tips as a primary source of information. I only ever search the iNaturalst comments when I want to see how others have interpreted the original source materials. What I’m hoping to find are those little tidbits of insider knowledge or tricks of the trade that can’t be found elsewhere. I don’t need a lengthy guide, how-to, or generic information dump, because I can always get a much better version of that from the original sources. Tell me something I don’t already know!
The more discussion I read on the forum about this topic, the less convinced I am that any form of extensive guidance belongs on iNaturalist. If you try to crowd-source guidance, the inevitable end-point is something like Wikipedia - which is certainly better than nothing, but can never be truly authoritative.
crowdsourcing was never our matter. It is for our “taxon specialists” to work on.