Just about 14,000 observations exist without any identification. Think about that in terms of amount of observations just waiting to help scientists across the world may get you jumping out of your and dashing to filter unknowns and get them identified, but wait! Don’t go yet! I know you might get discouraged pretty quickly on and that’s no help, nor is it very helpful to the scientific community. (although it is to some degree) I have a solution. Its not amazing and a way to filter them based on CV suggestions. (example: Say you are an expert with spiders and a total failure with identifying plants (don’t worry it happens to the best of us) and you would love to get through potential spider unknowns, but it just takes so long to find anyway you would be able to do a filter that brought up all unknowns where the CV would suggest a spider (or whatever taxon you would like.) Thats for a different feature-request post though. Granted, that idea could be stretched out more and used in a variety of ways.) Back to what the post is actually about!
When you go out to iNat the world around you generally find you have a pattern with what you observed the most when you were out right? (e.g. a bunch of lizards or a bunch of moths) Well, when people upload they also do the same therefore you could find a person in unknowns who is uploading a bunch of what you want to id filter observations to them and unknown and ta-dah! A bunch of unknowns of a taxon that you are comfortable identifying!
Even with @jeanphilippeb’s fantastic Unknowns project, it’s a daunting task, and the 2024 City Nature Challenge is right around the corner to give us even more.
One of mildly annoying issues I’ve found while searching for and providing identifications for observations listed as “unknown” is that often someone else is making a less specific identification at the same time and it may get posted just after your more specific one, reducing the specificity of the identification you’ve made.
Another issue is that “helping the community” by identifying ‘Unknowns’ (even extremely broadly, say ‘Animal’ or ‘Plant’) results in automatic subscription to that observation, and a flow of useless/nefarious notifications for the years to come (unless one repeatedly ‘unsubscribes’ from each and every observation, or just turn notifications off completely).
Broken system breaking identifiers and making itself unusable.
Add to that - iNat hides Placeholder text when any ID is added.
Placeholder might have had a meaningful ID, perhaps with a teensy typo, or a missing species needing to be added.
I just ignore those. I’ll look at comments or tags, I’ll look if someone IDs one of my observations, but the rest of the notifications I just ignore. I feel badly when I inadvertently create a Maverick, but at least I try to learn from those. Otherwise, I couldn’t get many IDs made at all, whether of Unknowns or observations already at species level that just need one agreeing click. It’s the best I can do.
A less specific ID added shortly after a more specific one does not automatically push the observation back to a higher level – at least I haven’t had this happen to me in the situation you describe.
Rather, iNat always seem to treat it as a non-disagreeing ID. I don’t get the choice of an orange or green button either, it just enters it as though the other ID hadn’t been entered, and then the other ID shows up above mine once my ID has been registered.
I mostly add IDs on the observation page; I don’t know if it is interface-specific or if it behaves differently if you are using the identify module.
I will often skip back at least a day or two when looking at recent observations to reduce the likelihood that another user is simultaneously looking at the same ones and avoid this sort of duplication of efforts.
That should be a pretty rare occurrence within a set of ~0.3 million observations though? If people are id’ing the very freshest Unknowns, that might happen. If so, I urge folks to start back a bit in time- like 1 month- or work in Random mode. Observers doing batch uploads, for example, are generally happier with a grace period.
No matter how many there are, it’s still way too many! It’s probably more sane just to look at the number of pages anyway, because otherwise it’s a bit overwhelming.
I have noticed this too. Placeholders often contain misspelled names. I always copy out the Placeholder and put it in my comments, like this - Based on observer’s Placeholder: information. I don’t usually have any idea whether their suggestions are correct or not, and their Placeholder information may be helpful to others.
I had it happen yesterday with 4 or 5 ID’s alone. I’d made a species level ID, and another person added a higher level ID a minute or so afterward, and the ID went from species up to the higher taxon level.
Later more people came in and added the same species ID I had and brought it back down to species level.
I’ve identified thousands of ‘unknowns’ and never had that happen. Either you and another user are very coincidentally doing the same unknowns at the same time, or maybe one user is following behind your identifications?
I think that is an exceptionally rare occurrence. I poked through your IDs and one user was simultaneously identifying the unknowns at the same time you were. Perhaps there was just a hiccup when IDs were happening in real time. I’ve identified thousands of unknowns and have never had it happen. Here’s one of yours like you describe and you can see it kept your more specific ID https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/201454138
It happens to me too. But if it that - right place right time - and I notice the other ID, I will delete mine if it was the tentative broader one (ultimately serves no purpose if the other ID is better). Good intentions and politely following guidelines but.
I like to try and work around this by either looking at unknowns posted during a specific period (maybe a few months ago, for example) or picking a random page number that’s relatively high and starting there so I’m less likely to bump into other people IDing the same observation at a different level at the same time.
Edit: I just realised I skipped over the comments from other people mentioning using similar methods. Whoops
In that instance, and in several others, it initially went to the genus ID I’d made, then dropped to the much more broad class ID after the following ID was made, then after nearly a day went back to the more specific genus ID.