Do people do that? I can’t say I’ve encountered ever it, but I’m not overly active on the forums
@kyle_campbell1 @sylvc just a heads-up, you can select text to quote and then respond to that text in a post. And you can respond to multiple posts in one post. Please do that instead of making separate response posts, it keeps things cleaner. It’s a little different from how most internet fora work so it can take some getting used to.
I’m planning on doing a free webinar about how to make IDs even if you aren’t an expert. Will probably be around the beginning of November, but date isn’t nailed down yet. It’ll be an expansion of two of the methods I laid out here.
I really like thinking of the ID process as a relay race (I need to change the text on that help page) where each person can pass the baton as far as they can, they don’t necessarily need to take it to the “finish line” (aka species or below, if that’s even possbile with the evidence provided).
You occasionally see comments like that.
Fair enough, but you could also say that the one doing the cooking and cleaning is the only one out of the 8 that actually knows how to do it… and they can choose who they want to cook and clean for?
I don’t think anybody who knows how to ID is sitting on iNat with a low percentage of ID-obs, so the capable ppl are contributing and I think thats a good system
Out of those 8x observers, how many are short term users? how many ppl use iNat for a few months then move on because its not for them? I think those will be interesting stats
testing
Undeniably rude but sounds like isolated cases
That’s fine, as long as they don’t start leaving sticky notes for the entire apartment complex to see complaining about how their roommate’s cooking and cleaning is being done. 
But it’s definitely annoying when you can’t choose your roommates! I’ve got some roommates I grumble about too…to myself. And I’m sure people grumble about me too….hopefully not to the entire town though.
Effectively the original post on this thread is ‘snarling at those … identifiers’. Then later saying, they rack up obs (still shoveling), but don’t ID for others.
I slot myself in the middle. And I lean on a cohort of kind and helpful taxon specialists.
The elephant in the room is how much fun the learning curve is, if you actively ID. My hiking group was discussing this Lachenalia ID, and, because iNat, we have a definitive answer - from - the author of our field guide! Awe some and wonder full. And we found a beetle called Mint Humbug 
- again with an ID from the relevant taxon specialist. Plus with monthly CV updates (today!) it is worth going thru older obs, and giving them a fresh pair of eyes.
Ahh, I assumed we were talking strictly about what the person I replied to said, rather than in general. I missed the later post. I agree though.
If anyone else said this then I missed it, but I think it’s worth adding that seeing constant expectations that iNat be a well-oiled machine rather than a community platform for those with free time is getting a bit wearisome.
I didn’t say everyone should be required to ID, just that it is not a particularly good look to complain because someone volunteering their time to help you did not help in exactly the way you wanted them to. Especially if they are providing more added value to you than you are to them, which I would argue is often the case with IDs.
Note that I’m not saying that you’re not allowed to be unhappy if they mess up or that this gives IDers a right to be rude without consequences.
(Edit: “you” here is meant as a generic you, not you personally)
When many spaces in the flat are ultimately shared, they cannot necessarily choose to only clean for select people; sometimes leaving one space uncleaned means that, say, cockroaches and bedbugs (= misidentified observations, not literal cockroaches, which some here might be excited to have a chance to observe and ID) will multiply there and infest the rest of the flat.
Maybe not everyone is skilled at cooking but most people can make sandwiches or chop vegetables or boil water or take out the trash when the bag is full. And this assistance is typically appreciated by the people who do know how to bake bread or wax the floor.
I didn’t start IDing because I had any particular expertise at that time. I started IDing because when I joined iNat there was a poorly designed school project in the larger region that was producing a lot of misidentifications and while browsing recent observations in the area I realized that I could distinguish primroses from daffodils or that “insect” had eight legs and was therefore a spider.
Yes, it takes a certain amount of courage to ID and it helps if if one has a certain amount of awareness of where the limits of one’s knowledge are (e.g. maybe don’t attempt souffles if you are still struggling with scrambled eggs). But it doesn’t require as much specialized expertise as people often seem to think.
I understand that analogies are prone to being… imperfect, but I’m losing the point of this conversation. What is your suggestion? That if a person complains about something on the forum, we should all just go and collectively blocklist them?
If this was a literal living situation, I’d move out and find another apartment. Cooking is one thing, but “not cleaning up after an ungrateful slob of a roommate” is not an option in a shared space, unless you are really into cockroaches. Because that’s how you get cockroaches.
This argument would sound way more convincing if this forum thread wasn’t started by a person who, per their own bio, “studied entomology in college”, has more than 12,000 observations, but only 2k IDs for others.
Really? I think there absolutely are tons of observers who can identify organisms but can’t/don’t identify other people’s observations. It can be hard to break into.
Or I suspect sometimes it simply doesn’t occur to them to do so. Either that they can (are allowed to) or that they should.
Yeah, I think a lot of people here on the forum are intimately familiar with iNaturalist’s workings and it’s easy to forget that a large proportion of the userbase probably isn’t. I’ve seen a lot of people who seem to either be completely unaware of the community ID system and just use iNat as a tool for getting CV IDs or think identifiers are some officially designated group of experts with special identifying privileges. I think the mobile apps especially really make iNaturalist look like its meant to be a tool for observing, not identifying (which I sort of get, identifying is a huge pain on mobile for understandable reasons, but I do think it’s unfortunate nonetheless…)
If you use iNat but you’re not on the forum, you never hear about the technical problems, the shortage of IDers, the many bad IDs generated by the CV, the taxonomic grievances, etc. It’s probably a nice, blissfully-ignorant existence.
From 2020 Feb 1
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/poll-are-you-primarily-an-inat-observer-or-identifier/
As has been said many times, the iNat Forum does not represent the average iNatter.
I think all of us who actively ID would agree with you there. That is why I for one grow weary of seeing references to bioblitzes and CNCs without equal attention being given to recruiting IDers. There is at least a partial cause-and-effect relationship between these two imbalances.
Lol! I think this needed to be said, and I couldn’t quite put the feeling into words myself. One recent gem: an ‘unknown’ observation I identified to genus (using the ML) to which the observer very promptly replied “It’d be much more valuable to get this to species”. I mean sure, but it might take months or years before anyone else looked at this observation, especially without an initial ID!
There’s others I’m forgetting, but as a relatively avid identifier and observer I have seen a fair share of snarky behavior on both sides, though I will say that since identifiers are being somewhat more altruistic in helping to ID others’ observations, I’d give them some grace for mistakes or oversights.
Don’t let the impostor syndrome get you down! Making mistakes is part of learning, something almost all cultures and educational systems fail at instilling in their members. If everyone only identified when they felt they were 100% sure or a “certified expert” in that group, we probably wouldn’t have half of the species in the ML models that help us all start to recognize patterns that eventually get us from ‘Life’ to Domain, down to Kingdom, Family, Genus and down to species or even subspecies level.
That said, I still have some slightly embarrassing mistakes from my early identifying days, but I’m finally looking at that more as evidence of learning than as a failure or a negative.
I don’t remember my exact process, but I think my own identifying was prompted by confusion between two buckwheat species in around the same area which were widely documented, but very frequently misidentified one for the other.
At some point I decided that since no one seemed to clearly understand which was which beyond gestalt (which often is insufficient), I decided to start:
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looking more closely at species descriptions on The Jepson Manual (a great resource in CA), and digging up references, descriptions, and photos until I thought I had a pretty good idea of how to differentiate the two. Equivalent tools, keys, and photos exist for many areas of the country and the world in many cases.
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learning simply by sorting through very old observations with no ID, putting “unknowns” into Plant, Insect, Mammal, etc., and going down to Family, genus or species where I could. Over time and just seeing more and more, eventually this process got me more confident that I knew what I was looking at. It’s also good to look at the already “research grade” observations in your area and see whether the images are consistent–you’d be surprised how many observations are in the wrong taxa entirely, which becomes more obvious the more RG observations you look through.
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just trying to become a local expert in one group, which led you to being more familiar with related groups. If you decide to classify some of the “Plantae” (or insect, fungi, etc) into various lower taxa, you might find yourself learning more about that lower taxa over time.
For example, Asteraceae is pretty common worldwide, once you’ve gotten a good search image for it in your head, you could identify them to Family where it’s at “plantae” or even “dicots”. Over time, you’ll get notifications that show the plant move further and further down the taxonomic chart, until the most common ones will become pretty familiar.
TLDR: Though it might take a while to feel comfortable IDing confidently, but anyone can do it with enough patience, willingness to be “wrong” sometimes, and diligence to learn from the ID refinements and mis-identifications.
… may be in vain if unable to keep them happy, motivated, to retain them over the long term.
There are votes piling for years on identifier-friendly requests, for example, and at least one ‘strike’ (that I know of).