No shenanigans involved - people either choose to help or they don’t. And anyone who’s counting 'fair share’s when it comes to helping has missed the point of helping, which is to focus on others rather than yourself.
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Many of the people on this thread enforcing these “shenanigans”, as you call them, are the same people that are doing more than their fair share.
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Basically, the only monocot trees are palm trees. Pandanus forms monocot shrubs. There are a few wierd +/- woody monocots in Australia. Basically, if a tree doesn’t look like a palm tree and doesn’t have long, grass-like leaves, it’s a dicot. Don’t worry too much about mislabeling woody monocots as dicots – we’ll find them and get them back on the right track sooner or later.
You are not required to identify observations you find that are not Ficus auriculata. Confirming the correct observations of this species is a valuable service. Thank you.
If you don’t contribute a disagreeing identification to the misidentified Ficus observations, they will stay in the database under that name. That may become a nuisance for your research, but I suspect there is a way to download only Ficus auriculata observations that you have identified as such.
Update: I believe instructions for doing this are provided in this discussion: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/export-a-project-w-my-identifications-not-the-consensus/42195/5
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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 certainly feel the frustration that caused you to think of this analogy. However, I must point out that this analogy proves the opposite of what you’re trying to say, on multiple levels.
So, the park (iNaturalist) is filled with litter (misidentified observations) that can be cleaned by being placed in the trash (their proper place in the taxonomic structure). Just like the litter analogy, there are physical constraints on what you can do to help. For instance, the minimum amount of help you can provide is to put a single piece of litter/observation in the trash/proper taxonomic structure.
Now, here’s what didn’t happen. iNaturalist staff didn’t suddenly put up a sign that says you have to do more than that minimum amount. Rather, iNaturalist has always allowed people to just do that minimum amount. Then you come along and want iNaturalist to make picking up litter easier than is physically possible. Once you’ve identified a piece of litter, you don’t like the effort of having to walk to a trash can. At this point the analog breaks down, because, once again, you’re wanting to make things easier than is physically possible. Perhaps a disagree button is analogous to flag that says, “this is litter, someone please clean it up.” Or maybe you’re asking for permission to throw the litter in the general direction of the trash cans so that someone else can pick it up and put it into a trash can. Whatever the case, a “disagree” button is non-constructive and does not help iNaturalist in its mission.
The great thing about iNaturalist is that it doesn’t require you to know the exact bin to put the observation in–as long as you put it in one of the big bins (dicots, monocots, etc.), it will go down a pipeline where other people meticulously sort it into the correct bin. You’re requesting for a way to “help” that does not put observations into the pipeline.
iNaturalist as an organization and all of us in this comment thread are saying “pick up whatever litter you want, whether it’s zero, one, or a thousand.” You are, in essence, demanding that iNaturalist come up with a way for you to do less than the physically constrained minimum level of work required to pick up and discard a piece of litter. I think your concerns fundamentally come from a lack of understanding of how this site and community works.
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Rather than the litter metaphor, iNat records are more like recyclable materials. A lot more sorting to be done (more work) to get the items in the right bin.
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Yeah, clicking a hypothetical “disagree” button that doesn’t place the observation anywhere is the equivalent of saying “look, litter!” but not doing anything with it, then demanding that the litter should now be gone despite not having moved it anywhere. If an observation just has one person saying “it’s an eagle” and another person saying “no!” then where even would that observation be categorized? It’s not an eagle, so where does it go now? It’s not helping anything to just point out that it’s wrong; you have to place it somewhere. I’ve spent time identifying moths in large institutional collections. When I determine a specimen is misidentified, I don’t just yell “wrong!” at the specimen; I have to take it from the tray that it’s in and physically place it somewhere. Where I put it determines how much I know about it. Maybe I have no clue what it is and I just put it in the undetermined moths box. Maybe I know what species it is and put it there. If you take an observation out of one species, you have to put it somewhere. It’s not just going to vanish when it’s marked “wrong”. And as has been mentioned dozens of times already, there’s an easy two-click solution to this problem- just enter “plant” as an ID and click the big orange disagree button.
To reiterate, the hours of effort put into this thread is, at its core, based on a desire to save one single click when making certain IDs. The commenters on this thread have collectively made millions of IDs, and no one seems to have a problem with the current structure.
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a dog is barking up a tree because it mistakenly thought a squirrel ran up it. you can clearly see that there isn’t a squirrel in the tree.
you: hey bozo, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
dog: actually my name is bowser. do you know which tree the squirrel is in?
you: no
dog: then you’re useless to me!
and it continues to bark up the same tree.
a disagree button is the equivalent of saying “you’re barking up the wrong tree”.
“I saw a man pursuing the horizon”
By Stephen CraneI saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never —”“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.
what should you be pursuing? i dunno. but i definitely know that you shouldn’t be pursuing the horizon.
“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.
“Those that you see over there,” responded his master, “with the long arms—some of them almost two leagues long.”
“Look, your grace,” responded Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants—they’re windmills; and what seems to be arms are the sails that rotate the millstone when they’re turned by the wind.”
“It seems to me,” responded don Quixote, “that you aren’t well-versed in adventures—they are giants; and if you’re afraid, get away from here and start praying while I go into fierce and unequal battle with them.”
And saying this, he spurred his horse Rocinante without heeding what his squire Sancho was shouting to him, that he was attacking windmills and not giants. But he was so certain they were giants that he paid no attention to his squire Sancho’s shouts, nor did he see what they were, even though he was very close. Rather, he went on shouting: “Do not flee, cowards and vile creatures, for it’s just one knight attacking you!”
what should you be attacking? i dunno, but i definitely know that you shouldn’t be attacking windmills.
in all cases, if you truly believe that someone is barking up the wrong tree, or is on a wild goose chase, or is on a fool’s errand, then this feedback is important and useful, and it should be extremely easy to share. whether they heed it or not is up to them.
think of cave people. food is scarce. there’s bob, rather than hunting and gathering, he’s doodling on the walls of the cave. does anyone trade him their yams (that they spent hours finding and digging up) for his doodles? of course not. the “minor detail” is that his doodles were technically a public good, so other people could benefit from them even if they didn’t chip in for them. so taxes were invented.
for sure there were groups of hunter gatherers that didn’t put much emphasis on trade or exchange. in these groups, there was no effective recourse for when members were barking up the wrong trees. there was no effective reward for when members were barking up the right trees. as a result, these groups never evolved.
inat isn’t somehow an exception to the fundamentals of feedback. ignoring these fundamentals is extremely counterproductive. if you can’t see how a “disagree” button would actually be really useful with the current system, then the current system is really wrong.
in terms of programming, debugging is a process of narrowing down where the bug is. take out half the code. does the error still occur? if so, then the bug is somewhere in the code that wasn’t removed. keep halving the code until you find the bug.
in terms of identification, halving the code is the equivalent of 1st figuring out whether the organism is a plant, animal, fungus or other. for sure anyone is welcome to venture a specific guess as to the id (where exactly the bug is in 12 million lines of code). but if their specific guess is wrong (ie eagle), then if somebody clicks “disagree” then this should automatically be counted as a vote (boooo) for the raptor category. if anyone clicks disagree for the raptor category then this should automatically be counted as a vote (boooo) for the bird category. and so on.
in this way everyone browses and works at the level they feel most comfortable identifying. even young kids should be able to help out with this system.
The history of Unix should have prepared us for what we’re learning from Linux (and what I’ve verified experimentally on a smaller scale by deliberately copying Linus’ methods). That is, that while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which bug-spotting and improvements get done by hundreds of people. - Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Exactly. Part of the point of correcting mistakes on iNat is not just saying “you’re barking up the wrong tree”, but telling the metaphorical dog where the squirrel really is, so that it could be more useful.
Switching to another analogy, if a detective is searching for a thief in a house in some town, and you knew the culprit was in that town but not in that house, wouldn’t you tell the detective that, instead of just saying that the thief isn’t in the house?
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@epiphyte78, your analogies are not useful, and only lead to everyone wasting time on irrelevant tangents. Now you’re quoting poetry and literature? Just stop.
Might I suggest that your time would be more productively spent describing, clearly and concisely, what changes you want iNat to make and what effects would result from those changes?
@Averixus asked you some specific questions, a few hours upthread. Why don’t you try directly responding to those?
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Have you considered, @epiphyte78 , that perhaps you need to stop?
You continue to explain how your time and energ yis limited, that you have none to spare for a second click but you keep disproving this by arguing ad infinitum and super wordily for something that Staff has said will never happen.
You claim iNaturalist as designed cannot attract specialists yet you profess simultaneously to be one and here you are?
Respectfully, you are your own windmill, your own barking dog, your own long walk to and from work uphill both ways through deep snow.
I and numerous others have suggested you look around, take a beat, ask how things work and give it a fair shot but honestly you just seem intent on spending your clearly not so limited time arguing. That is a fine pastime but perhaps you might enjoy a philosophy forum more.
I submit that maybe, just maybe, as designed, this is not the site for you?
If so, I wish you well on your own site that you start that will, how did you word it?
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I’ve set this topic to close in four hours, it’s not really constructive any longer and I think everyone’s said what they’re going to say.
iNat has no plans to add a “disagree” button for the reasons I stated above.
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Thank you. I was hoping someone would do that.
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I know the conversation is going to end soon, I just feel like I need to say a few things. First, I love your quotes of literature. However, I do want to stress that, like the other analogies you have brought up, they disprove your case.
Imagine if Sancho Panza complained that there needed to be a one-click button he could use to “disagree” with don Quixote, instead of being forced to speak words to him in order to communicate. Seriously, you’re requiring iNaturalist to make things easy on a level that is physically impossible to achieve. Besides, there already are extremely low-effort mechanisms for expressing disagreement on iNaturalist. For instance, as has been repeatedly pointed out, you can comment “I disagree.”
in this way everyone browses and works at the level they feel most comfortable identifying. even young kids should be able to help out with this system.
This describes the current iNaturalist system, in which hundreds of thousands of volunteers from eight-year-olds to eighty-year-olds have added hundreds of millions of identifications. Everyone is able to identify at the level they feel most comfortable identifying. Why should the system that literally hundreds of thousands of people love be replaced with the system you suggest?
The irony of the Eric S. Raymond quote is that iNaturalist is “harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities” and has for years, while you are using only your own brain and ignoring the wisdom of dozens of people who have been doing this far longer than you have.
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Arguing is fun. Stopping is not. Far from stopping, this person has started another Forum topic. We can’t change this person, but we can change ourselves. Let’s disengage.
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Hear, hear! Have you seen any nice mollusks lately?
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I haven’t, plenty of nice ducks though!
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Great way to end this topic, y’all. Before it closes, I want to report that I saw a cardinal today.
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