I made my first ID after I had made 5000 observations, I’ve been trying to catchup since then but it looks like I’ve been slipping further down, even though I’ve cleared all the unknows and plant observations for the highveld provinces on my personal ID dashboard.
I think with identifying, its important to check you notifications so you can pick up when you’ve made a mistake by someone correcting it, and you can learn from that. If that misidentification goes unnoticed by the person who made the mistake, it just becomes an obstacle for the other IDers
That makes sense in that context. But what if you’re buying the food and paying the bills? It’s not like observers aren’t making any contributions to iNat - they’re observing. I don’t think we should expect everyone on iNat to be IDers, it takes more knowledge to make IDs than to make observations, so IDers are more elite in a way because even though anyone can make an ID, not everyone can make a correct ID (or is at least willing to follow up on their notifications and correct their misidentifications)
I think it’s as important to focus on one’s own observations as IDing the observations of others. I mean doing the homework to get your obs to the best ID possible, making sure your obs has good notes associated with it if that is helpful, doing the necessary cropping/editing of your pics to make them the best possible, and paying attention to notifications. In other words, being a good observer so IDers don’t have to waste time on your records. But it’s true that “tending one’s own garden” does take time that could be devoted to IDing for others.
Not trying to be rude here, but as an overworked identifier, it can feel a times more like they’re eating the food and dirtying the laundry than that they’re buying the food and paying bills. I know that’s not the full picture at all, just trying to express a different perspective.
I do make mistakes, but I will not always find those to correct them until to late (maverick) as unfortunately I do not always get @tagged if that happens. I am not able to keep up with each notification and will usually just check those where I suspect there might be new information for me (e.g. some IDers that follow regularly after me, I know they might be correcting or commenting but not tagging) and of course comments and tags
I agree 100%, the better you get at your own observations, the better your IDing skills will be, its a snowball effect, when you get good at IDing your own stuff you become more confident in IDing other peoples observations of similar things, and so you learn…
I mentioned it above - even going through all the ‘unknowns’ can be a HUGE help. There’s probably a ton of fungi stuck in there that I COULD be IDing, but I’m never going to find them in the pile of blurry pictures of leaves.
especially when you get those blurred unknowns, or an unknown with 2 different birds in it and you ID the wrong one and hear about it from the observer… It’s the part of IDing that nobody tells you about. If I start getting irritated by the observations I’m IDing, then I know its time for a break, luckily we control our own pace of making contributions
we all make mistakes that we miss, the key is to try an minimize the mistakes we miss, I also come across mavericks and even obs I’ve been tagged in that I miss somehow, and I go through my notifications regularly
I have done so many unknowns, at a stage my unknown filter for SA was blank, currently I do the unknowns in the inland provinces every day and then the plants for the highveld areas every day (so at the end of every day those filters are blank for me and the next day I start with that days observations), but that’s only a few pages of identifications a day… but I’m happy with my IDing contribution, even if I’m not near as many IDs as observations
While pfau_tarleton did word their opinion in a more hostile way than I would myself, I understand their sentiment.
There is no rule, written or unwritten, regarding a proper ID to observation ratio a person must have to participate in the community or air their grievances. But like in any other social scenario, it’s important to step back and consider what you are complaining about, in what form, and to whom.
iNaturalist is a community science platform. Identifiers are volunteers who don’t get paid for the work they do. And there’s a whole lot of that work that needs to be done. There are currently more than 100 millions of individual observations on iNaturalist still waiting for IDs.
I was discussing that matter in another thread, and even based on my super oversimplified “identifying things at 1 observation per minute” math concluded that it would take 2083ish years worth of working as “iNat identifier as a 9/5 office job” to get through the currently existing pile of observations.
Again, that isn’t to say that every observer must identify things. If a person wants to stay a silent observer “tending to their own garden” – that’s completely fine, imo. That’s what I did for my first 1000 observations.
But at the moment the burdens of observing and identifying are (in my opinion) not comparable. So if someone who doesn’t participate in the identification effort then barges into a nest of identifiers to complain about the fact that they (who are already spread very thin trying to sort through millions upon millions of grains of sand) may sometimes miss things and not give their observation as much attention as that person feels it deserves – it does feel a bit insulting.
Calling that person “a burden” over it might still be unfair, but given that it’s a response to a “you’re not diligent enough with all that unpaid labor you do for me” complaint… honestly, I get it.
I suppose that probably is a fair representation of what the forum is, though I can’t say I’ve ever thought of it quite that way before. But it gave me a laugh and I doubt I’ll forget it… :-)
My internet connection can be astronomically slow - identifying from thumbnail is vastly preferable to waiting for each individual picture to load. I ID on iNat in my free time, which I don’t have much of. If I’m not 100% sure from thumbnail then I will open the full picture, but if I am then the ‘Agree’ button is all I need. I try to pay attention to my dashboard to catch any mistakes
As an observer who is very grateful for the time that people take to ID my observations, I feel the urge to return the kindness by trying to ID at least species that I’m a bit familiar with, but it makes me feel unqualified and always stop.
Honestly, if there was a course/workshop to become an identifier on iNaturalist I would take it (and it would bring funds to iNat). It would help with the impostor syndrome. And I have to say one time I got a species ID wrong (on a species that I see often), really made me feel silly despite the other IDer kindly and instructively wrote to me why this was a different species. But the level of expertise of IDers is quite high so observers like me don’t want to dilute it.
I can see in the future the number of observers growing a lot but the numbers of IDers not really. So growing this relevant skill is important but also a bit daunting. Maybe this if for another topic of its own…
I think the best way to do this is to start learning about the plants and animals that are in your particular area! I think a course offered by iNat would be great, but it would have to be a very broad overview. What do you find yourself drawn to? Birds? Plants? Mammals? Even if you can’t ID down to species, being able to take something down to the daisy family (for example) is a help.
I don’t think that analogy works, since it seems to equate observations as worth an equal amount to ID’s. There are more than 8 times the observers as identifiers (just looking at the explore page), so the supply of observations seems high, and the demand for identifications is also high. Most identifiers are also observers, so possibly a better analogy is you have 8 roommates all paying rent, but only one is cooking and cleaning.