I love people can help each other identify our specimens BUT can anything be done about the Identification Farmers? It’s a bit obnoxious to get the 4th, 5th, nth email about another exact ID from them.
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that said, i would rather exist in a world where other folks are making identifications than a world where they are not. there are lots of legitimate reasons to make additional IDs even once an observation is research grade. there’s no need to characterize all of that as any sort of farming.
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Observe more plants! 4th and 5th IDs are not usually an issue there.
:)
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In your notification settings, you can turn off receiving notifications of confirmatory IDs that agree with yours. This should solve the problem.
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Welcome to the Forum!
Just a note that iNat asks us to assume good intentions of other users. Many users adding additional IDs are doing so for their own reasons unrelated to “Identification Farming” or other pejoratives as evidenced by the previous responses on other linked threads.
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I will agree, it is slightly inconvenient and in the past I was flustered about it as well. However, I’ve changed my perspective and have even become part of the “problem”.
Here are a few examples why they are good to have:
- If a prolific (or any) identifier deletes their account, the extra IDs will keep the observation as RG
- protect from future misidentification taking the observation out of RG
Recently, I have reviewed all observations (including RG) of plant species groups I am intimately familiar with. Historically I used to only correct errors, but if I’m taking the time to review an observation why not add that I’ve confirmed the species? On the same note, in my area there have been one or two prolific identifiers that have a high (not just once in a while) rate of incorrect IDs, many of which are agreeing IDs that bring them to RG. So now instead of only looking through non-RG observations I am looking through everything and will add an ID to RG observations for the same reason.
Disabling notifications for agreeing IDs is a good solution, and perhaps in a future update to the platform changes could be made so that notifications are handled differently. Just as you may feel annoyed, I also feel guilty when I know one user might be getting 100 notifications of me agreeing that observations they’ve IDed previously are American cranberry!
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As long as the identifier is making a fair ID claim, on their own authority, not just confirming the existing ID just because it’s there, that’s should be the desired behavior, IMO. The 2 agreeing IDs for RG is the bare minimum, and it’s set like that because of how hard it is to get enough people to ID. If we had 10+ (independent, authoritative!) ids per observation on average instead of <2 as it currently stands, the data would be much more robust & reliable.
That being said, I can understand how such notifications could be annoying. The approach would not be to stop the identifiers, but have a more refined way of filtering notifications.
…also, if you have an excess of identifiers, kindly send them my way, especially if they want to identify some, I dunno, mosses, instead of “birds” :D
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It’s nice when rank-hunters add annotations, offering some further contribution.
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Well I’d recommend not uploading any North American Bombus. There are several of us that take a fine tooth comb to those observations, but is it really a bad thing to have 2, 3, or 4 people who all have a certain level of expertise helping to ensure that the observation is correctly ID’d? Have you gone and read the profiles of these “identification farmers”? You may find that some of these are specialists.
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I agree with others in this thread that such “identification farming” isn’t a problem provided that the observer has the required knowledge to make an identification. The problem comes when identifiers add confirming identifications of things they don’t really understand well or end up ghosting the platform after a few months. This can make it virtually impossible to correct incorrect identifications. I see this problem especially in central and South America where half a dozen identifiers or more will make an incorrect species level ID and be completely unresponsive to correction.
My recommendation: add confirming IDs if you are confident in your ID and you know what other species look like that in the area of the observation. Stop adding confirming IDs once it gets past four or so confirmed IDs to at least allow correction to happen in principle.
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I don’t pay attention to notifications, so this isn’t something I think about as I only ID ‘needs ID’ observations.
However, there is an system glitch whereby I have come across some observations that ‘need ID’ but already have a lot of concurring IDs (more than 2/3, and sometimes 100% are concurring). I always add mine to the pot and see what happens. Sometimes, my ID does the trick, but usually, whatever the glitch is, the system still thinks an ID is needed. At that point, I go to ‘Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved?’ in the Data Quality tab and select, ‘No, it’s as good as it can be.’ That always bumps the observation to Research Grade and ensures I, and others, don’t see the observation in the ‘needs ID’ list again.
I’m not sure if it’s right to do that, but sometimes it’s the only way to prevent this from appearing for another dozen people as a ‘needs ID’ observation.
I share this because it’s possible that some of the ‘ID farmers’ are just people like me caught up in a system glitch that no one has put an end to yet.
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I’ve 100% done this but the last thing on my mind is farming IDs. My main concern is verifying that every observation of a specimen is correctly identified, and adding a supporting ID is a great way to do that, even if only a few percent of RG observations are actually confidently misidentified lookalikes. Sometimes I’ll add a supporting ID because it’s an interesting morph of a species (I typically ID insects), or a tough angle that someone might misinterpret down the line. I consider this to be giving my best to iNat. I’m sure there are people who are just doing it for the “number go up” dopamine hit, but I’d like to think anyone doing this is doing it with the best intentions. Fully agree to disable agreeing ID notifications if it troubles you, but this is a behavior that I think should be encouraged so long as it’s done with thought behind it.
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It’s admittedly extremely annoying to get a notification about the 5th side-blotched lizard ID or the 8th California barrel cactus ID (especially when even slightly more obscure cactus can sit unconfirmed for months…), but fundamentally this practice is pretty harmless.
It can be annoying when a mistake is found and it becomes a pain to outcompete the dogpile IDs, but I don’t think there’s anything obvious to do to discourage it other than what is already done.
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Have they Opted Out of Community ID?
Then you are all ‘wasting your time’.
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You can also UNfollow an obs when future IDs no longer interest you.
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And keep away from snakes!
(Not because they could bite you - generally they won’t - but because of dozens of ids)
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Calling people as Identification Farming is pejorative, please, dont do it :(
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I have posted 3 mosses(first one was posted Nov 12 2024) that have not received an agreeing ID, birds get one before I can refresh the page after posting the obs. 
And you can add fungi to the “will it ever get an ID confirmation” list.
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This may be a bit off topic, but how do we know people care about ranks/leaderboards/any other clout? Most top identifiers I know of are very knowlegable when it comes to the species they ID a lot of.
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