To be honest, I don’t think a one-click disagree button would help much. If you agree with an Id, then boom! You are done. Especially if your identifying a simple, recognizable thing (like, I don’t know, an toucan?). But if you disagree, then what do you think it is?
A good (entirely hypothetical) example is me uploading a picture of a mantis egg, thinking it’s a paper-wasp nest or something. Someone else could one click disagree. But then what is it? What do you think it is? However, in the extra clicks that it would take to id ‘mantis egg’ or just ‘insects’, then a lot more information is conveyed, and it is a lot more helpful. It’s like a debate where one participant says an idea, and the opposing participant says 'NO! You are wrong!" before pouting and refusing to say another word. So, yeah, that my reason not too add this. If anyone disagrees, please explain why. Both so that I could use it to prove how much more useful an in depth explanation is compared to a single word argument, and also so that I could figure out if I’ve said something wrong or ignored a potential point on why a single click disagree button would be good.
THIS.
exactly, disagreement with no other info is very unhelpful, to a point of spite. if you disagree with the id you have to offer an alternative, even if it is just i agree that it is a plant. and ideally, even that should have a comment, eg. i am an expert on genus A and this is not genus A.
I agree - mostly. It’s just frustrating when said ‘normies’ have no interest in adjusting (or even withdrawing) their wrong ID and therefore things languish at high-level IDs for years at times because either there aren’t enough ‘experts’ to overcome an apparently uninterested observer or they just don’t see it in the mountain of ‘dicots’ or similar. But I can’t come up with a better solution, so…
For once, my argument is agreed with by someone! Also, I thought of one use of a one click disagree. To ruin your worst enemy’s observation >:)
“Trust me, I’m an expert” is not really a legitimate argument here. (And thankfully I have not encountered it.)
from the Community Guidelines:
Don’t justify identifications with your credentials or dismissive comments like “I am the world’s foremost expert in magical aquatic plants, so if I say it’s gillyweed, it’s gillyweed”
What I have encountered and what is helpful: “It lacks the following characteristic(s): X,Y, Z.”
It’s not always possible to give a good explanation. Gooseneck barnacles are frequently misidentified as bivalve mollusks. But it does no good to say you can tell it’s a barnacle and not a mollusk because of the jointed appendages if there are no appendages visible in the photograph. The best you can do is to refer the observer to photographs of gooseneck barnacles.
I would think that pushing incorrectly identified observations out of the genus you’re studying is in fact part of cleaning up the data for research… is that not worth one extra click to ID the observation as “plant” rather than “unknown”? Presumably clicking a “disagree button” would place the observation into the “unknown” category, and the only reason one should ever want to send an observation all the way back to “unknown” is if you can’t even tell what kingdom it’s in. That would be the only time a one-click “disagree” without entering any identification would be useful. 99.9999% of the time, it’s at least obvious that something is a plant/animal/fungus; it would be irritating to have all the observations where someone disagrees with a species name thrown into one giant pool of mystery observations where no specialists can find anything. Speaking as someone with over 300,000 IDs at this point, I suspect the time I’d have saved by having a one-click option in these cases is still less than the time dedicated to this forum thread…
Thank you for saying it. I am still trying to overcome this stigma of using it: it is more time-consuming to start typing in a name than to let the CV suggest it, but I have been doing it to avoid the “CV user” icon from appearing on my identification. As the iNaturalist community comes around to recognizing this, maybe the perceived stigma will fade.
To hell with the stigma if there really is one. I’m lazy enough to just let the CV fill in the name for me. ;-)
I read through just now to Tony’s reply
and skimmed the rest and have to ask, “why is this thread still going?” The system works well, I think the only confusion arises when people get alerts for non-disagreeing IDs, go to see what’s identified and see someone ID to a higher taxonomic level (in many cases without disagreeing!)
Maybe the non-disagreeing IDs at a higher level shouldn’t come with a notification, or should be highlighted in a different color or otherwise communicate more clearly to casual or uncertain users what those IDs mean.
I’m pretty hard disagree on the idea of a “disagree” button, it’s true, you can always ID to the highest level you’re confident and then hit either “I don’t know, but I am sure…” or “No, but it is a member of…” as seen here in a related thread:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/questions-about-how-id-disagreement-works/59211/17
each day, after a hard day’s work, i walk home through a park filled with litter. obviously there’s no rule that says that i have to pick up any litter. on a normal day i have just enough motivation, time, and energy to pick up one piece of litter. am i doing more than my fair share? well yeah, because if each day each visitor to the park picked up 1 piece of litter, the park wouldn’t be filled with litter.
on some days, for whatever reason, i’ll feel extra motivated and i’ll pick up more than 1 piece of litter. sometimes i’ll be especially motivated and i’ll pick up like 20 pieces of litter.
then one day the park puts out a sign, “nobody is permitted to pick up only 1 piece of litter. if anyone picks up any litter, they need to pick up at least 3 pieces of litter.” whoever made this rule is definitely not seeing the forest for the trees. if they think this is going to result in more litter being picked up, they are sadly mistaken. that’s really not how human motivation works.
i’ve been steadily working my way through all the observations of ficus auriculata because it’s my research focus. most of the ids are correct and i just hit “agree”. a few id’s are slightly off, they are a different species of ficus. other id’s are really off. if i happen to recognize the tree, i’ll type it out. in one case, which evidently i’m not allowed to link to, the tree looked amazingly like ficus auriculata, except it had big white flowers! it kinda blew my mind and i used google lens and spent like 10 mins of looking through the results to settle on ochroma pyramidale. seems like there’s a strange amount of variability in this plant that i’d never heard of before.
when an observation id’d as ficus auriculata is not even a ficus, and i have no idea what it is, and don’t feel particularly motivated to do some digging, ill just tag @dgwdoesthings, because he said that i was welcome to do so. i kept forgetting how to spell his username until i thought of a mnemonic trick “dogwood” minus the vowels. sometimes he’ll supply a specific guess, and other times he will just submit “dicot”. anyone know the main difference between monocots and dicots? you can’t graft monocots. at least not easily.
and it’s kinda bizarre that typing “dicot” is more useful than simply clicking “disagree”. if it truly is, then just put a tree icon button somewhere and i’ll click on it. i can do that. nobody has indicated that the organism in the observation is a tree? fine, i’ll be your huckleberry. i’ll click the tree button until my thumb blisters. then i’ll use my other thumb. and then both my big toes. then i’ll resort to my pointy elbows and lastly i’ll push the button with my nose. by then the blisters on my thumbs would have healed.
but the main point is, don’t resort to shenanigans to try and trick people into doing more than their fair share. whenever people here do more than their fair share it’s despite, not because of, the shenanigans. find these people asap and give them the kudos they need to stick around.
I’ve not quite grasped this. I always use the CV. I normally upload about 50% animals/plants for which I know the ID. I appreciate the CV shortcut.
Now, for things new to me, I do a lot of comparing, studying etc. Once satisfied, I return and use the CV to agree with whatever I decided was the correct answer.
And as long as we’re talking about agreeing, I disagree with having a disagree button; ha. It’s been noted in many posts how one can achieve the same outcome but in a more positive manner as it now stands.
just a note that I am a woman and would rather not be called he
Use the CV suggestion. Lots of us do.
The perceived stigma is their ‘still learning to iNat’ issue. If they choose to value - I can typing …
monocots- usually linear/striate leaf veins, often flower parts in 3’s or multiples of 3, lack of lateral meristem/secondary growth, single cotyledon, usually perianth not divided into calyx and corolla
The problem with that is trees are not a monophyletic grouping and include woody and wood resembling growth from plants in gymnosperms and angiosperms, dicots and monocots
My suggestion is, if you disagree with something, you can just comment saying that you don’t think that an Observation has been ID’d correctly. If you can as well, do a bit of research on what it might be. More people will hopefully ID it correctly.
If you really want a disagree button, can you explain exacty how it should be implemented? What impact should it have on the community ID? How should it be incorporated into the ID calculations when compared with previous IDs, future IDs, those at higher and lower levels?
If you can determine all of those details clearly then you’ll have a feature request which you can submit and solicit votes from other users. And then if a significant number of other users also want the same feature request, the staff might consider it.
At the moment you seem to be demanding that the entire site changes on a whim to suit your own personal convenience, which doesn’t come across as very reasonable or polite.
if it really inconveniences you that much, just press rewivewed.
Here a better illustration:
My friend graciously offers to help me with my dishes, but when they do, they only wash half of each dish. When questioned about this, they say “you should be grateful for any amount of help I provide.” It would obviously be way better if my friend washed half the dishes fully instead of half of all the dishes. So if you are going to review observations, do so fully. Reviewing half as many observations the right way is better than leaving twice as many “half washed”.
Additionally, because you are proposing a large-scale change to the platform, it’s like my friend saying, “you should just purchase and install a dishwasher so it’s easier for me when I offer to help wash your dishes.”
I’m uncertain if you are reviewing ficus observations to use for your research, or if you are doing it because you enjoy reviewing them outside of work purposes. If the former is true, then the litter example especially doesn’t hold true, because you are receiving a “service” in return, and essentially you come off as “I expect maximum effort on others’ part in exchange from minimum effort on my part.” If the latter is true…
Actually, the problem with that is that now we need a ‘bush’ button’, and a ‘fungi’ button, and an ‘insect’ button, and a ‘cute furry animal’ button, and an ‘it bites!’ button, and so on, and before long we’re out of space and no one can find the right button anyway…