Description of need:
Currently, the people-page (linked to above) is quite useless, IMO. It doesn’t display any really useful information (except maybe the leaderboards which could be interesting to some) and doesn’t do the one thing which I would expect it to do: find people.
Another semi-related problem is that identifiers complain about being tagged on observations they cannot really add to much because the leaderboards on the taxon page may give other users (who have not done their due diligence) wrong impressions. Also, users have trouble sometimes with finding the right person to tag.
I think this feature could solve all of these issues.
Feature request details:
1) Identifier/Curator profiles
Allow identifiers to add a special field to their profile about their areas of expertise (multiple can be listed), that would be displayed somewhat like this:
Identifier for <taxon> in <location>
Add a similar feature for curators, maybe displayed like:
Curating/moderating <curation task> of <taxon (if relevant)> in <location/language(s)>
A few examples for what it might look like:
identifier for Tribe Coccinellini globally
identifier for Family Platypezidae in Central Europe
curating conservation statuses in Germany
curating taxonomy of polychaetes in Europe
moderating user content in English, German
2) Making this information searchable on the people-page
In a second step, let users search for people using this information on the people-page:
Search for <identifiers/curators> for <taxon> in <location>
and
Search for <moderators> who speak <language>
and
Search for iNaturalist Staff
etc…
Identifiers/Curators/Staff who don’t want to be tagged too much have the option to not add these fields which would make them un-searchable in this menu
Allow identifiers to add a special field to their profile about their areas of expertise (multiple can be listed), that would be displayed somewhat like this:
Identifier for <taxon> in <location>
Something else that might be helpful would be some way of indicating the level of IDs that you typically do in an area+taxon. For example, I do a lot of superfamily/family/subfamily caterpillar IDs in the tropics because those can help point people in the right direction and I have enough info to do that, but I’m almost never going to be able to give a species-level ID. But I can do a lot of species IDs for eastern North America. So if I were setting this up for myself, I’d want to be able to do something like
Identifier for Lepidoptera in eastern North America at order to species levels
Identifier for Lepidoptera in South America at order to subfamily levels
etc.
Not exactly the feature you want, but this covers some of the fuctionality:
Use Explore/Observations in iNat: Click explore, set species/taxon, set location, go, and click on the identifiers tab and look at their profiles.
Attach site:inaturalist.org/people to your query using any search engine. For example, searching for “platypezidae site:inaturalist.org/people” should lead you to a very familiar profile.
The issue with this is that people listed as top identifiers for a species in Explore may not actually have any expertise in the species. Explore is based on observation records, not identification records, and it thus provides results for people who have ID’d observations that have a particular community ID – not people who have provided IDs of that taxon. So people who do a lot of broad IDing of observations that are later refined by experts may can quite easily end up on leaderboards for taxa they don’t know how to ID.
Obviously, yes, one can go from there to look at user profiles to see what expertise they mention, but a lot of people don’t seem to do this and profiles often only provide a very rough idea about whether the user can help with that particular taxon. (E.g., I do a lot of broad IDing for bees in Europe, and finer IDing for some bee species in some parts of Europe, but my profile doesn’t specifically indicate which ones and where because that is a level of detail that isn’t likely to be relevant to most people visiting my profile. But if there were a way to specify this on a per-taxon basis so that not have my name is not suggested as a relevant expert in places where I can’t provide finer IDs, I would use it.)
At very least encourage people to provide some information.
What interests you? Where?
So many profiles are blank - and I have click thru their obs for where, and obs and IDs (You don’t ID for others? That is a dead end) for their preferred taxa.
I like the idea behind this, but do worry a bit about how much mentioning it might lead to. If someone is the only person to list themselves for a specific taxon/location, they might get an ungodly number of mentions. That might be the case especially when this was first implemented (if that were to happen) as most users update their profiles very infrequently to never and there would only be a small proportion of users listing their expertises in their profiles. On the other hand, my perception is that the people page doesn’t get too much general use (but maybe I’m wrong on that), so perhaps the feature wouldn’t be widely known. Personally, I would be reticent to add this info to my profile and invite a mentionstorm. I already know how to find the observations that I want to ID personally, so I don’t think this feature would lead to mentions directing me positively to observations I otherwise wouldn’t have seen. And I think there’s just as much a chance of this feature increasing the mentions I do get as to decreasing them.
Another issue I might worry about is that even with this feature, it still requires users to do “due diligence” when mentioning someone. Even with this info, it will still be much easier to just tag the top three users on a leaderboard rather than click through to their profiles to check their expertise or use a people page search to find IDers. I think only “power users” would be likely to do that. One potential solution to that could be to have a way to have a more detailed profile “card” pop up for users on mouseover/hover that could include some of this info.
Are they still even active on iNat - you have to click thru to their profile to see - hasn’t been here for YEARS after a blitz thru Preferred taxon maybe for a research project? Otherwise your polite request is dead in the water.
After a few replies along the lines of a random example - I only know dragonflies in Idaho. You - click thru - to fathom where, before you ask the next one.
After another irate Do NOT@MENTION ME - you check first for the profile that warns you to Stay at a polite, and silent, distance.
My list of who to ask for what and where is long, and grows day by day.
At some point there was an idea (or feature request?) to allow opting out of ‘leaderboards’.
Combine this with options to appear selectively in some leaderboards (for these taxa of choice and/or these localities of choice) - that would have been much appreciated. Anyway, that ship has sailed, there are now much pressing ‘features’ to work on.
You raise a lot of good concerns that I hadn’t really taken into account, and I don’t have an answer that solves all of the issues. However, I think that the combination of being effectively an opt-in choice that can be opted out of again at any time, being exclusive to the website, so that app users (probably where most new users are at that aren’t yet familiar with “iNat-iquette”), and the people page being relatively obscure, would generally do much to prevent the worst.
If someone receives too many notifications, they would be able to opt out again (perhaps in addition to just not adding the fields, there could be a separate opt-out setting, that would still allow IDers to add the fields to their profile, while remaining unsearchable).
Also (and this may be very naive) for “problem taxa” (many obs, difficult/impossible to ID to species, and/or few IDers) I think that over time a balance would be reached. I think there would probably be identifiers in many cases who are perfectly happy to do the grunt work of looking at different organisms and sorting into “probably cannot be IDed further”, “this one species is actually fairly easy to distinguish”, and “interesting, let me tag some others”. (I expect that these would be done by people currently learning to identify these taxa who have already reached a certain fluency, but may not have gained familiarity with every species)
It might be better to wait with implementing this feature until measures are taken to improve the identifier:observer ratio.
These issues might perhaps be solved by an announcement/blog-post that would at least get some attention initially (the amount of comments on the genAI blog post indicates how many people do actually see them.
I like this idea a lot. I don’t know if it should be mouseover, but something like what happens when you click on a profile here on the forum would be great!