I have seen comments from taxon specialists - can’t confirm without flowers or fruit - I need flowers or fruit.
Your way is correct.
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This is how I have been using the orange button.
If the evidence is definitely not sufficient to confirm the species (specific key features are not visible) and there are other species in the area that cannot be ruled out, the ID should not be at species level. The orange button pushes it back to genus. The green one does not.
There have been some previous discussions about the wording and whether it expresses what it is intended to, e.g. here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/doesnt-inat-commit-a-basic-logical-error-when-an-identifier-suggests-a-higher-order-taxon/44144
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I don’t see the point of writing something and interpreting it differently. If there is a conflict between the wording and the intended interpretation, that should be sorted out. I think the current wording is clear and makes sense, and I don’t know why anyone should assume a different intent behind it.
Great, this is my interpretation, too. Now we all conflict with the Etiquette. :)
This is what I thought we were supposed to do too. There are some fungi that can’t be differentiated without viewing spores under the microscope. If they just pick the species the CV suggests that looks like it, they could be right or they could be wrong. I have been pushing it back to genus and marking as good as it can be.
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Thank you so much for this! I’ve been struggling with identification etiquette for awhile since I began and for the last week I’ve been having people message me about my poor etiquette and this from really helps me out
I have also interpreted the orange button as @lappelbaum @spiphany @regnierda and others have suggested. If someone posts a photo that is inherently unidentifiable to species-level, not due to lack of identifier expertise but due to a lack of necessary features being observed, it should not have a CID at the species level. Even if there’s a chance the suggested species may be right, if there’s a reasonable chance that it’s not right and there’s no way to confirm/deny, that’s when I smash the orange button. To fail to do so would just leave tens of thousands of observations of difficult species complexes randomly assigned to one species or another with no rhyme or reason to which name is on which species. If species A and species B look the same in most photos, then whether a given photo gets posted as species A or species B is essentially random.
I’ve encountered users who were basically pulling their hair out trying to figure out why one set of 500 observations are labeled species A and 500 others are labeled species B when there’s no discernable difference, when trying to work out which species their observation is. The simple answer is often “none of those 1000 observations should be at species-level; there’s literally no visible difference between the two sets of photos”. There might in fact be 500 of each species posted, but which photo gets assigned which name in a cryptic species complex is a crap shoot.
While it does rub some people the wrong way to have their observations bumped “back to genus” when their ID might be right, I think this is ultimately the right thing to do. It’s a good learning experience to find out that what I’ve been calling one species is in fact a whole complex of cryptic species that I can begin looking into and paying closer attention to. I strongly oppose the idea that an ID should be left alone if you can’t definitively disprove it. If that were the case, I could post a blurry photo of a fly and call it any species in the world and say “please don’t disagree with me, because I might be correct for all you know”.
I like the current wording of the orange button a lot- it’s not asking “are you sure the finer ID is wrong”; it’s asking “are you sure the finer ID is unsupportable by the evidence provided”. The fewer features are visible on a photo, the more possible IDs could be correct, but that shouldn’t mean that unidentifiable observations get whatever species name the observer wants to give them.
Essentially, I’d say the burden of proof is on the person supplying the finer ID to defend it, and if they can’t provide evidence to do so, the most honest thing to do is back it up to a coarser option.
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