I don’t know what number constitutes a high-volume. I do hundreds on most days. I have never used the thumbnail. Maybe I could do more if I did, but I am careful about quality as much as possible. I like to look through all of the photos and notes/discussions, etc. Often I find obs that have multiple plants or multiple species of a single genus so looking at all photos is important, I think.
I use the regular search with grid view most often (so I’m slower, I suspect), but if I’m working in a single Genus (such as Cakile) then I will move into Identify mode (but still look at every photo in an observation and often zoom in as well to be sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing).
I agree that iNat could do a much better job of making the notes more visible (when I was new to iNat I never noticed them until I made my first mistake of missing them and an observer mentioned I had not seen his note). Maybe a colored band or highlight over them would make them stand out more. They often add important additional information and I think should be treated as important by being more visible.
When I’m looking through plant observations for my local area, particularly in spring, there are a few species that are very distinct and easy to reliably ID from the thumbnails, often scattered through lots I can’t ID or need to look at more closely. Sometimes I’ll do a quick pass picking out the few per page I can easily ID from thumbnails, then go through more thoroughly later. It’s significantly quicker to click on ‘agree’ maybe five times on a page of 30 than to tap through them all (particularly since my internet can be slow). And it’s often clear enough if there are multiple species because of the way hovering shows up to four photos. So, not something I do a huge amount but definitely something that I would say has its place.
And on the topic of this post, frankly, if the identifier has selected an ID for a species that’s present and left a note saying they actually want a different, less obvious species that’s also present, I’m not really interested in reading the notes to check - which is the only reason I can see for needing to read the notes if there’s an obvious, matching species-level ID.
Well, I used to do all my IDing on a laptop and I would do what you describe.. for certain ID-patterns I prefer this way of cycling through the whole page using the keyboard. This is of course especially convenient if I go through a set that is not a species level and most of the times cannot be (e.g. Dolomedes in Europe). But for certain ID filters this is not convenient even on the laptop, e.g. if I can generally only help with 3 of 30 observations, it is annoying to click through all those I cannot help with anyways.. then I will just skimm the overview page agree with the easy ones I know and open up only the ones I can refine and hit the next page..
However, at the moment I do basically all my IDing on the phone and here I use the identify page only as an overview, as the whole “cycling through” on the phone is extremely tedious and there are no shortcuts anyways. If I go through specific species, I will have a look through the page and agree with anything that is easy for me to ID on the thumbnail (zooming in on it more if needed, which is of course easier and faster done on the phone, but might lack fine detail) and open anything else in a separate tab, if I need a higher resolution or need to see more photos. Of course the opening an individual tab for each observation is much more time consuming, so anything I can resolve in thumbnail view will safe a lot of time for me… which is anyways only an option if I am at species level (I am at the moment, but most of the time I anyways have to open the observation to suggest a finer or different ID)
I had one recently where the observer uploaded a wide shot of some grass ID’d as a bee. I ID’d as grass since I couldn’t find any bee. He insultingly told me how I was ruining the data and told me where in the photo the bee was (I still had to look for it, because it wasn’t where he told me in the photo). So I changed my ID, but he still proceeded to insult my contributions. I can’t flag him though, because he deleted the observation and blocked me.
So, yes I really don’t like it when observers delete observations. Complete waste of my time. Honestly it’s getting so frustrating dealing with some observers complete lack of understanding regarding mistakes or the amount of time that identifying takes, that I’ve pretty much stopped. I still ID a bit. But lines like “misidentifications are of no value” don’t really make me excited to add ID’s like I used to.
I am one of those who ID from the thumbnails in the Identify tab. Guilty!
Nowadays, I’m almost always looking at observations that are already at species level. Sometime, I am looking at observations at the genus level, where there’s only one species in that genus in my region or the species is quite distinctive from other species in that genus in my region (say, Lobelia cardinalis in bloom in the northeastern US). Also, I’m usually looking at species that are quite easy to ID from a single good photo. I also skip confirming IDs where I’m just not sure - the plant is not in flower, or the moth is at a weird angle, or there are tracks of a squirrel but I certainly don’t know which squirrel.
Am I guilty of missing notes occasionally? Yes. I do respond to comments or messages telling me I blew it, however. Do I make mistakes? Of course, I’m human.
But I am torn between my need to be perfect and my need to move as many observations out of Needs ID as possible. Where’s that statistic showing how many errors I’ve made? (I thought I bookmarked it, but now I can’t find it.) If my percent of incorrect IDs is below 5%, then perhaps that is as good as we can hope for.
Of course we should all look carefully at every observation we ID. Of course we should strive to make as few errors as possible. But we are also human and thus imperfect. What’s a reasonable % of errors we should make? How do we resolve the conflict between error-free IDs and making IDs as fast as possible, since the number needing IDs grows ever more quickly?
Your ID efforts are valued by far more people than those who are acting selfishly and are unappreciative. Please don’t let a minority impact your valued contributions. It’s hard, though, I know!
(Working on a laptop, using “Identify” for identifying, for bringing up a series of observations to answer some question I’m having, for annotating, etc., etc.)
My most common approach to identifying is to pull up something of interest (a location, a taxon, etc.) and arrow from one observation to the next. The notes are visible. Do I use them? Probably, but that depends. You see, people use notes for all kinds of things; their identification if they don’t really understand how to use the site or if they disagree with iNat’s taxonomy; the location; habitat data; behavior; the number of bees collected from this flower; ecology. I usually glance at the notes but I may not, especially when I’m tired or focusing on identifications or if I’ve just been through a series of observations from a person whose notes cover something I don’t find useful for ID. If I find something about the observation confusing I do check notes – or wish they were there to check.
Thumbnails: I use them for multiple purposes: for a quick scan to see if there are interesting observations on the page; to choose an observation other than the first to start paging through; to hit “reviewed” for observations I won’t want to see again, like fungi; sometimes for identification. Identification from thumbnails is efficient and practical if the organism in question shows up large in the photo and is easy to ID. It’s very rare to find a whole page of observations that easy, though. Usually I might ID observation #3 from a thumbnail and then open #6 for a better look, then page through from there to the end. Do I make mistakes because of using thumbnails? Yes, but not often because I only use them for easy observations (or ones I would think are easy and would ID the same way on thumbnail or larger page, though I might find out that was a mistake). Obviously, one must pay attention to context when IDing from thumbnails; if I’ve pulled up Oregon records, a magpie is obviously Black-billed but if the records might be from anywhere I have to open the page to see where it was.
What about missing observations that have multiple species (I mean, photo 1 shows one species, photo 2 shows only a different one, etc.)? I would take this more seriously except that I’ve managed to miss the problem both when using thumbnails and when I’ve opened the observation. I mean, using thumbnails increases the chance I’ll make this mistake but it’s not as high a percentage increase as it probably should be.
There are a couple things you can do to increase the chance that we’ll see and pay attention to notes:
If there’s a big obvious animal in the photo but you want the small plant or insect identified, identify it as “plant” or “insect” or some narrower taxon within those groups! Then we won’t ID it from the thumbnail.
If some part of your note will be especially important to identifiers, put it on the first line, maybe in its own paragraph. Don’t bury it among other stuff that may be important in other contexts, but not for us.
If the note is really, really, really important, open the observation after you uploaded it and put the information in a comment (as well as the note). We identifiers are more likely to see comments than notes.
And there are highly active IDers who are regularly rude, dismissive, and insulting and make no secret of the fact that they have a very low opinion of regular users and their ability to provide good data. In some cases observers (and other IDers!) who have encountered these individuals have been put off of participating on iNat, or at least participating in such a way that makes encounters with certain users likely.
Inconsiderate behavior is not exclusive to observers or IDers. Let’s not make this thread about pointing fingers or a debate over who has to endure the worst abuses. iNat is, ultimately, also a social website, and as in any activity that brings diverse groups of people together, some of those people will be having a bad day, or be poor at communication, or have an abrasive manner.
Where these tensions turn into conflicts, it often seems to result from at least one of the participants being unable or unwilling to see the situation from the perspective of the other user or to recognize that there are other needs and desires besides their own. Let’s try to avoid that happening here, shall we?
I’ve never heard this unwritten rule? I certainly don’t think it’s necessary to call someone a burden to the system because you have decided their observation-ID proportion is too low for your liking?
I imagine that if you have two quite different species in the first photo but only one in later photos, and include a note to say which you’re interested in, it would be fairly clear that they’re not either reading the notes or looking at later photos if they pick the wrong species to ID?
It’s not a rule, written or unwritten, more like a recommended practice. I’m not a “power IDer” but I’m also not a “power observer”. I have more IDs than observations so I feel I’m doing okay.
It’s not a rule, but the logic is similar to the idea that, say, if you live in a household with multiple people it is a bit rude to complain about the cooking or the time that dinner is ready if you don’t regularly help out by doing the cooking or other household duties yourself.
“I’m curious. How does one go about determining this to be true?”
You could ask. My answer: I find that sometimes I didn’t read notes that would have helped and sometimes I fail to find the multiple species observations because I didn’t look beyond the first photo. I shouldn’t do these things and usually I don’t, but sometimes I am careless. I assume that other identifiers make similar mistakes. At least I hope I’m not the only one.
I don’t want to add to the pile on - but it is much appreciated when a person’s ID contributions match or exceed their ID requests. I say exceed, because unless your ID is correct in the first place, it takes two (minimum) IDs to get to species level (and often more, if disagreements are involved.)
Really, 2x IDs vs Submissions is a good place to aim for.
This doesn’t mean you have to be an expert identifier, often shuffleing the unknown pile into the proper kingdoms/families can be enough to really help out, because it gets stuff in front of people that are more knowledgeable about those groups.
