I’ve had people get testy with me because I’ve elevated their unknown to a lower level than they wanted. I have to explain that my goal is to get their observation up to a level where experts will actually see it. Often its because they have IDed it in the notes, which aren’t obvious when you are going through and identifying.
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No person is born with the knowledge of how organisms are classified. No one comes to iNaturalist for the first time and understands everything about how it works. Introductory Biology students at the university often do not know how to tell a cultivated plant vs. a wild one. People who are or were professional biologists (like me, I’m retired) often do not know the plant families, even if we post and ID a lot of plants.
For all of those reasons and more, I’m inclined to bend over backwards to be kind to new iNaturalists, to new naturalists in general. Uploading an observation as an Unknown is not a crime; even people who are experienced with iNat do it occasionally for perfectly good reasons. I firmly believe (sorry, Diana!) that identifying an Unknown as a Dicot or Conifer or even just Plant is better than leaving it as an Unknown. However, when I do ID Unknowns from my region - and I’m starting to do that more now - I try to get observations to species or genera or class.
I keep being amazed at how different people use iNaturalist in different ways and I think that’s a good thing.
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Just based on my anecdotal experience, I’ve had many more negative interactions by omitting a copy-paste message when IDing unknowns than I have by including a copy-paste message.
If a new user has posted a bunch of observations that don’t include any ID, it can be helpful to them to include a message in your IDs along the lines of “hey, welcome to iNat! if you put a general ID on your observation like ‘insect’ or ‘bird’, you’ll get your observation ID’d by experts even faster”. If someone is upset by this sort of a message, that’s unfortunate, but I’ve not run into that issue before.
What I have gotten angry messages about is when I do provide a general ID like “spider” or “bird” or “fungus” without any message. Multiple times I’ve had rude responses along the lines of “I obviously known it’s a spider! Thanks for nothing! Stop spamming my notifications with uselessly vague IDs! You’re NOT being helpful!” (these are almost verbatim comments I’ve received from observers just from adding a correct general ID) IDing unknowns to get them into categories where experts will see them is not only a thankless job; it’s a job that often results in active angry pushback from observers who don’t yet know the system. Anyone who’s IDs a few thousand unknowns here and there has probably had this negative interaction. I know people who’ve been blocked over it.
So I think the copy-pasted explanations by unknown-IDers are more meant to explain to new users why they’re providing a general ID than they are to chastise anyone for not including an ID themselves.
Put yourself in the identifier’s shoes- you’ve just spent 5 hours categorizing un-labeled observations as “bird”, “insect”, “spider”, etc., which the observer probably could have done themselves in 99% of cases, and your only feedback is a couple of observers replying to tell you how pointless your contribution has been. I’ve been there. Yes, you may begin to feel a bit irked (though I’m always pleasant and would never imply annoyance in what type into a comment). And yes, you would probably want to come up with a copy-paste message to leave next time to try to preempt the angry reactions.
I agree that an unlabeled observation is better than no observation at all, but a labeled observation is better than and unlabeled one most of the time- so I don’t see it as a problem to let new users in on best practices, as long as it’s done pleasantly and positively. (“You can label this something general like spider and get even faster responses from spider experts” as opposed to “Stop posting all this unidentified stuff you n00b”.)
As for truly unknown observations- as in ones where the observer doesn’t even know whether they’re looking at an animal, plant, fungus, or “other”- I’d say just ID them as “life”. I have quite a few of these myself, mostly of mysterious green blobs taken in a microscope. But when you’re going through the tens of thousands of pages of “unknowns”, these are a minority. Usually the observer knows that they’re looking at a plant or an animal, and often they leave a comment asking which of a few similar species it is, but they just aren’t familiar with the typical IDer workflow in which the taxon experts they want to show their picture to focus on only observations ID’d at some general level. I see it as a helpful gesture to let them in on this information to help them get their pictures ID’d faster next time.
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As someone who goes through Unknown observations regularly, I agree that comments to add an ID on the pages of long-time users do not contribute to improving the site. An experienced iNatter knows what they are doing by marking their observations as such and it is their choice.
For new users (I’ll consider “new” as joined in the past 2 weeks, the same time frame used in the Frequently Used Responses page here) its a different story as there could be many different reasons an observation has no ID. Some examples I’ve come across are:
- The user is not familiar with how the ID system works and is expecting someone to easily find their post from upload alone (I see this a lot on the mobile app especially). I’ve commented on posts like these with a pre-written message and many have replied thanking me for the info.
- The user made an account in order to figure out the species of a cultivated plant or domestic animal. I see many observations from new users that are just a potted plant in their house before moving onto wild observations. It is great that they are taking steps to know more about the world and a friendly comment can nudge them down the right path.
- The user is a student instructed to download iNaturalist on a mobile device in order to complete a school assignment. Said user may not have an interest in keeping their account active afterwards, so an informative comment could catch their interest.
- The observation is not a living thing but mimicks one (such as a manmade decorative plant or a stuffed animal) and marking it as “Life” would not be correct. These users usually are not aware that objects created by humans do not count.
iNaturalist is a site for everyone, regardless of experience and that includes novice IDers. Most people who comment on experienced observers to add an ID do so out of good faith and want to improve the quality on as many posts as possible. As long as they are not doing so in a rude or condescending way I don’t have an issue with it. My advice is to reply to them explaining why you would mark something as Unknown so they understand your intentions.
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In my opinion, an observation should almost always have at least an initial ID. I understand many people are not very familiar with nature. That’s ok. But the CV is there for a reason. It’s not at all perfect. But many of the plant unknowns I see have CV suggestions like, “we’re pretty sure its in this family, tribe, genus, etc.”. Also I know one should not expect people to be knowledge about biology, but I would say it’s kind of hard to grow up in most places and not learn what a plant is. Not like a scientific definition, but like its those green things that grow. If it’s something you truly don’t know, like a worm or something, unknown, or life is completely reasonable.
While there isn’t a perfect solution to the issue. With my experience. If an observation is not IDed as Chironomidae, I will basically not see it for a long time. Possibly weeks, or months, or ever. Any Chironomidae observations above family ID are lost and have to be found by purposely looking for them by me.
Even lower wrong IDs I feel are better than IDing a higher taxa at least in many cases with what I ID. If somebody IDs a Chironomidae as a Nematoceran flies, or Flies. I won’t see it for a very long time, possibly even ever. But if they use the CV and ID incorrectly as say Tanypus. I will see it in a day and can correct it.
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There is one more thing to keep in mind regarding Unknown observations.
I have seen some users who aren’t new to iNaturalist consistently upload Unknown observations. From what I assume (I may be totally wrong), they just upload large batches of observations without ID’ing any of them prior to saving them most likely to save time/effort. I did notice that if these are left untouched, the observer will often go back to do a coarse ID but weeks/months later. This may have to do with data usage or internet access too.
I feel if anyone will get “upset” about unknowns of simple things it would be for a reason like this.
IMO, 9 out of 10 newbies appreciate the explanation for coarse ID’s especially when there is an explanation on why.
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I agree, and try to do this kindly as well.
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I did not say that and I do not understand why you think I said that.
In my opinion, yes - but only if you use it correctly. They both have some small use cases, and the difference is mainly that Unknown is used by people who don’t understand the iNat system, and Life by those who do. The point of IDing as Life is to say “I have made an effort to determine what this is, and I can’t narrow it down to Kingdom.” Some identifiers specialize in confusing blobs, or seaweed (which is annoying because it could be a plant or it could be an algae, and there’s no easy way to tell), and those people can search Life and attempt to get those observations at least to Kingdom.
Unknown means basically the same thing, “I don’t know what this is,” but it’s 99.9% of the time used by people who don’t understand that you’re supposed to add an initial ID. That means that the vast majority of Unknown observations are plants, not confusing blobs, but plant identifiers are unlikely to look for them there - there are just too many, and identifiers usually search by lower taxa.
I don’t see a point to “getting rid of” Unknown as an option. We don’t want to encourage people to use Life the way Unknown is currently used. But do try to encourage everyone to add the most precise ID they can to all of their observations. That could be anything from a subspecies to Life. It’s important for identifiers to be able to search for their taxon of interest and have people’s observations be sorted correctly. No one who understands this system should be identifying as Unknown, but that doesn’t mean Unknown is bad, it just means that not everyone knows the best way to use iNat. Our job is to be supportive of these people and hope that some of them do learn and join the community.
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That’s also true. Some people have different work flows that they prefer. There is nothing inherently wrong with having a special workflow you develop for yourself. But it is important to think about if your workflow could impact others unintentionally. In this case, some people spend time IDing unknowns. If a super user uploads hundreds of unknowns a day because that is their workflow. It probably impacts those IDers.
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As someone who IDs a lot of unknowns, I avoid this issue by either setting my identify page to sort obs by “random” or editing the date to show obs that are more than around two days old, plenty of time for most power users to go back and ID their observations.
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Yeah I try to add a helpful comment when I’m identifying unknowns because my guess is that the vast majority of “unknowns” are not due to the uploader having no idea what the image is, but instead because they simply don’t know what the most effective way to use iNaturalist is. Giving them the information that “a broad ID makes it more likely that someone who can help will be able to identify this” seems like good info for a newbie to have.
Because of this, though, I do refrain from adding the comment when folks have hundreds or thousands of other observations, since I figure they already know that and the unknown was just due to an incomplete upload from the mobile app (which happens a lot) or because they have no idea what it is – in which case I usually just ID as “Life” and don’t leave a comment either.
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Also one other benefit to putting a broad ID on observations is that it avoids some confusion about the subject. Lots of “unknowns” show something like a group of plants with some fungal and viral diseases and a bug crawling over one of the leaves… If the user has provided no ID whatsoever, one identifier may add “plants”, another “insects”, and another “fungus”. Even if the observer eventually weighs in and says “I was asking about the bug”, if the other identifiers miss the notification, the observation can stay stuck at “life” for a while due to all the conflicting high-level IDs. If they had just ID’d it as “insect” or even “animal” to begin with, lots of time and confusion could have been saved. Again, better to have the post than not have it, but giving new users advice that will ultimately save both them and the identifiers time is a good idea.
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Go with Dicots and Plants, I have the Placeholder text fixed in my sight now ;~))
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I generally put an ID of “Life” on the things I genuinely have no idea what kingdom they may be in, mostly to signal to other identifiers that it’s not simply something I forgot to add an ID to.
I do wish more people would take the time to add a broad ID to their observations when possible, but I really hate it when people use the CV suggestions without any clue about the organisms. I’d much rather it be left at “unknown”! It makes it much harder to correct, and much harder for the right identifiers to find in the first place. I regularly check the plant category and unknown category for my area, but if someone uploads a plant and accepts the CV suggestion that it’s a fungus, I will never see it to correct it, because I don’t look in that category.
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there have been variants and forms of the app which did not allow you to put in unknown, it basically made you put in a coarse taxa like ‘plant’ or ‘animal’. My observation is it broke the app for a lot of use cases, making it a lot less versatile. The ability to put in placeholder text for unusual species, unknowns, etc is really valuable and I do use it a lot. I know some people don’t like to see the unknowns but as others have said you can set your filters to exclude them during identifying, if you want.
I feel like one other way to reduce this phenomena is creating some sort of ‘draft mode’ where after you upload you can choose to review your observations, add IDs, etc, before publishing them to the website. But i think the concern there is stuff will get sent to draft and people won’t understand how to get them published to iNat, or will forget.
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No one actually “picks” unknown - that’s the term iNat uses when an observation lacks a “real” ID. So it’s not really a selectable option, just word used when an observation is in a certain state. It could be changed to “No ID yet” or something.
In my experience this usually happens because of a few reasons, which others have already laid out, and it’s mostly becuase people don’t know they should add an ID, or they’re not in an area where they can access the iNat database and thus successfully add an ID.
No one should be chastised for not adding an ID upon upload. If they’re new, write a polite comment telling them that they should add an ID before uploading, if possible. If they’re not new, add an ID or don’t add an ID and wait for the user to eventually add one, there are plenty of other observations to tackle.
There’s language available in the frequently used responses page, and you can use a text expander to easily enter it. In my experience this mitigates the issue of someone being angry about the coarse ID, and many people often say thank you.
Moving forward, the redesigned iNat app makes it much more difficult to post an observation that lacks an ID (I doubt we’ll ever get rid of the option, though. As others have said, better to get the observation than not get it).
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when you make a new observation, you’re taken to an ID screen before you get to the main observation edit page. the CV model is available offline.
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iconic taxa are available to add as an ID even if you’re offline and can’t access iNat. It doesn’t’t cover all taxa but it covers a majority of them.
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the “Upload Now” button remains white and less enticing if there’s no ID for the observation.
(Please don’t offer feedback or ask questions here about iNat Next in this thread, I just wanted to bring up that this is an issue being addressed in design. You can check out tutorials if you want, I’ll be adding video ones later.)
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I love coming across obs marked Unknown. I see them as a challenge and an opportunity to be helpful
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We have different views on this. When I see a lot of Unknowns, I find myself thinking, “Could you at least put in some effort?” Unknowns feel like observations where the “thought,” and perhaps also the “time” and “energy,” have not been put into it. For example, when using the app, there is a “What did you see?” form. Even placing a thumb on it triggers the CV suggestions to come up. It wouldn’t seem to take much thought to understand that this can be filled in with one of the suggestions, even if they don’t know on their own what it is.
I cribbed the following copypasta from an active identifier:
Add your own ID at the narrowest level you feel comfortable with, for example, “plants” or “beetles”. Observations with an ID are much more likely to be identified. If you leave your observations like this rarely anyone will look at them.
I also have translations of the same for when I am identifying in a Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking area. By having this ready to go, I can avoid saying something that may sound unkind.
Only once in my 969 observations have I not been able to put at least a kingdom-level ID, and the one exception, I still researched before uploading to see if I could put something. I put “Life” because leaf curl can have causes from more than one kingdom. It wasn’t a case of having no idea; it was a case of knowing that there were possibilities in several kingdoms.
It can be hard to avoid having the attitude, “If you didn’t put in the effort, why should I?” Wasn’t there a thread awhile back where someone thought that iNaturalist was a “service” – as in an identification service for their observations? The reply explained that it isn’t a service, it’s a community. Well, in the scenario that Paul Dennehy described, it can sure feel like we’re being expected to provide a service.
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It’s because so many people add observations of birds. In California alone I ID hundreds/day, and sometimes the list of needs ID gets longer as I’m IDing them! I find easy to ID photos even months in the past that just slip through the cracks.
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