How do I use Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?

I’m having trouble using the “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?” in the Identify tab. Thank you so much!

If I check the box “no” and then switch back to the “info” tab then it usually doesn’t save my entry for “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?” So it’s already pretty slow…

Also, the fact that switching to the ‘data quality’ tab takes a long time relatively speaking… I have to go back and forth between the info tab and the ‘data quality’ tab, because if there aren’t already two IDs for the same thing, there’s no point checking “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?”.

How do people use “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?” Is it worth using given how much it slows me down when identifying?

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You should wait for some time to have it registered, it is definitely slow.

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Haha I’ve had it take 10 minutes a few times though and the little round thing to indicate it isn’t entered yet still doesn’t go away! (I’m using Firefox 83.0 on Windows)… this is more than just my lack of patience :)

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Do you use identify mod or just visit the observation?

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I use it mainly for the taxon ‘Gray Tree Frog Complex’. This complex contains two species with a large overlap of range and they can only be differentiated by call or chromosome count. If there is an observation of a frog that is one of these species but with no way to tell which one (as most of the observations are) I can vote “no” for “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?” and it will become RG at complex level. This only works for taxa that are genus-level or lower, otherwise it makes them revert to casual. I find people often apply this to observations with an ID that CAN be improved, so if you do use this make sure that what you are voting for is actually true.

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identify mod… I like to go thru hundreds at top speed ;)

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Then you click on it and go the next observation, then check the observation page to see if it’s registered (on the identify page it can say it’s not, but in fact it will be). In fact everything “thinking” in identify mode resolves by clicking away, it’s something about the page.

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My impression is that checking either box under “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?” can cause more confusion and prevent further IDs from being recognized, so it’s best never to check either of those boxes. I never do, either on my observations or anyone else’s. It’s not required or expected that you use it, so best to leave it alone. Perhaps there could be some improved wording in that phrase, or some additional explanation as to the consequences of checking Yes or No. It’s not obvious and not well explained.

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Yes, this is what I do. If you wait for it to auto-update itself, it usually takes maybe 20 sec for me (still too long using Identify) but if you just keep going it does almost always save correctly with the box checked.

I go back and check sometimes to verify after getting through 30 observations, and it’s almost always there.

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There’re tons of cases when checking these boxes is needed, this thread is not about that though, it’s about slow work of the website regarding these boxes.

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Yes I mostly use this for cryptically colored genera of flies for which species ID is basically impossible, so that future people going thru ‘Needs ID’ won’t see them.

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I find it least frustrating to do this as an annotation separate from identifying. Like comments and other annotations, if you put in an ID and then immediately check this box before the ID has saved fully, the “based on the evidence…” check will be lost when the ID updates. I also generally don’t add an ID if there are already 2 or more at the lowest possible level, I just check the box without IDing, so I don’t have to wait for the ID to save. I do move on to the next one without waiting for it to show that the checkbox has saved.

In most cases that means I’m either checking the box instead of IDing for observations I haven’t already reviewed, when they are in the “needs ID” queue in the usual way, or deliberately returning to observations I have reviewed and making them Research Grade as a separate step.

This second way would be much quicker if the Community Taxon showed on that tab of the IDing interface, because then one could leave the Data Quality tab open, check the box, go on to the next record, and repeat. The slow part is going back to the Info tab for each observation to see what the Community Taxon is (especially if there are wrong IDs and disagreements to factor in), then back to the Data Quality tab for the checkbox. Being able to filter for community taxon (instead of observation taxon) at a given level would also work. But the combination of how the community taxon works, how the checkbox works, how the tabs on the ID page are arranged, and what there is and isn’t a keyboard shortcut for just makes it impossible to do these efficiently.

I have done large-volume work with that (complexes id’d to complex like raymie mentioned are a great example) and other “hey is this even working right now?” DQA tickboxes. I find it does work to stay on the DQA pane in Identify as I’m doing those, after I’ve looked through a set of several candidates at a time in the normal view, to make sure which ones I want to tickmark.

As you go freshly onto an obs, you may see a “ghost” of your previous click from another obs flash on the tickmark site you want to check. Wait until that goes away, tick the box or the thumb and then immediately just go forward on to the next obs. You’ll find it will have been done in the background if you check back later.

The title certainly makes it sound like this thread is about that. That’s what I expected when I clicked.

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I use it only in cases where one of two criteria are met:

  1. Most often, I use it when the observation has been IDed to genus, and there is not enough information on the photo to verify which species. An example would be Frigatebirds, in a locality where two or more species occur, and all the photo shows is the black shape of the bird.

  2. Rarely, I use it when there is a photo so blurry that you can hardly make anything out. An example would be a very blurry photo of some insect perched on someone’s bathtub, where you can just barely tell that it is an insect rather than a spider.

I don’t recall ever using it to vote in the affirmative.

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Completely disagree on this one: I regularly ID groups which have descendent taxa but cannot be identified to those based on the photos provided. Some examples are the blackberries and dandelions. As has been said already, checking the box that the ID cannot be improved based on the data provided stops these from cluttering the identification pages.

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Yes, but post itself is clear.

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