I personally ID A LOT, and generally we always get somethings wrong, we are human, people (me included of course) need to realize there are misunderstandings, we get things wrong. One thing I have learned from real life civil and online discourse that really helps a lot is generally assume best intent, both the identifier and the person who is correcting your ID both (usually) have intent to help out others and even if it can come off strong, people have bad days and I can’t blame em. When in some cases people are completely ignorant about corrections, identification etc and you know for sure they don’t assume best intent, thats what we should be trying to combat on inat, but I get it, it can be embarrassing when you get a wrong ID. I can say though don’t take that as a bad thing, take it as a growing or learning moment (cringe I know right:joy:) but yeah, thats my take on this
I’ve made each and every one of those; add in “oops, didn’t double check the range” and “oops, was intoxicated” too. Or heck “dropdown menu lagged and I misclicked”.
ID’ing on iNat is a pain; the ease of posting observations is probably a plus on the whole but there are so many photos to wade through that simply are not identifiable to even genus, let alone species. Small bits of shed snake skin, pieces of lizard poop, animals that are very similar to each other in most life stages and require scale counts or even just a real clear view of diagnostic features…that you usually don’t see in photos.
@DianaStuder@spiphany Actually, I just assumed high-volume IDers use the thumbnails, because I don’t know how else they’d manage it! I’m in awe of the people who do the heavy lifting on IDs, and figured that was part of how they work their magic. I like to add annotations as well, especially for some taxa like lepidoptera, so the thumbnail method wouldn’t work for that anyway.
I’m really frustrated about my observations that I explicitly state escaped or not planted and people still mark them as Captive/Cultivated.
Observations · iNaturalist 637 of them, of which around 200 I cannot overturn on my own. Another 1000 observations or so of mine could easily be overturned with one more downvote if someone disregards my notes.
No. I usually leave a note for the observer, but good to know about. I’ve been using iNat for a long time, but still discovering new things I didn’t know about. I think it was just about 6 months ago that I learned about the Identify mode after years of using it.
Agree wholeheartedly. Just last night I missed a note and today the observer left me a (thankfully nice) note saying I missed his note. Argh! I was in Identify mode last night and I think I work more quickly in that mode so it would really help there, too, to have a color band or something that makes it stand out…as well as the regular view when you open an obs from the grid.
I worry about this so much…I like iNat because it is NOT like other social media (full of nasty comments)…you just come on here, do the IDs and enjoy learning and seeing what people are photographing and experiencing. I worry as more and more people come on board that it could change (and bringing in more users seems to be the point of the ambassador program). Another exmaple was hearing about the many people that “cheated” in some of the recent challenges just to get up in the leader board (to me that is NOT the point of iNat at all…being at the top of a leader board). I do worry. I wonder if iNat could do some education about the value/importance of identifiers and how to handle when someone discovers a potential mistake by someone making an ID…lest we lose more identifiers due to situations like the one you encountered. Maybe in their newsletters?
I liked reading in this thread that someone is doing presentations about the importance of and need for more identifiers. Maybe that could get just as much focus as bringing in new observers?
But who did this? I never saw anyone complain about the way ppl ID?
Who was rude? I also never said ppl can’t mess up, quite the opposite actually, I said its fine to mess up as long as you are willing to look at your notifications and correct your mistake, especially if you aren’t 100% sure of your IDs… there’s users that agree with the first cv suggestion and forget about ever looking at the observation again, leaving it at dicot for years
I don’t understand where you got blocklisting from? (might be due to my ignorance - what is blocklist?). All I’m saying is that you can’t expect the average iNat user to make IDs… If you don’t want to learn from iNat or if you don’t want to help people with IDs then you shouldn’t, and that should be fine. If the rule was, you must make an ID for someone else every time you add an observation, how much work do you think that would make for serious IDers?
Exactly, its easier to scroll past observations and avoid users that you don’t want to deal with than it is to move out of an apartment?
Who is the ‘ungrateful slob roommate’ representing on iNat?
If those newbie identifiers are mentored (by teachers willing to share their taxon knowledge) and newbies are willing to learn - ultimately we will ALL gain! That is the only way forward - with one CNC day of a MILLION obs.
yes I agree - the ultimate goal should always be towards more productivity in the IDing section. In the perfect world every newbie can be motivated and willing to learn, but the reality is that that is just not the case… and where will the mentors come from? with the IDing load being as high as it is, how many ppl will still have time to mentor people and go through the phases of learning with them? I think the key to better ID stats is to calibrate cv accuracy as high as possible, that is joint work of IDers and observers, and might also be something for the perfect world scenario, but it certainly helps a lot if the first cv suggestion is correct (as it is for many taxon with decent photos), then IDers would only need to confirm IDs and comb out the cv mistakes, decreasing the load on them
Follow the conversation chain for context about the post I was responding to and the post that it was a response to. You can do this by clicking on the arrows on the right side of the post (in the quoted text or beside the avatar of the user whose post is being responded to).
My analogy was a response to a now-deleted post questioning whether it was appropriate for the original poster to be complaining about IDers not paying attention to notes when they have a fairly large number of observations and comparatively few IDs for others even though they have a biology degree and thus presumably some knowledge they could contribute. It was never about “you are required to have as many or more IDs than observations”, but rather about considering how one relates to the community and recognizing the work being performed by others before expressing one’s displeasure with them (hence the analogy with the idea that it is generally not considered cool to complain about the food if you don’t help with the cooking).
There are various other posts in this thread where it has been pointed out that both IDers and observers may be guilty of unkind remarks. Because there is a tendency for nuance to get lost in these forum threads, I wanted to clarify that my comment was not meant to imply that IDers get a free pass just because they are contributing to the community. It is relevant and legitimate to point out things that are causing problems, but there are more constructive responses than complaining.
A number of people in this thread have suggested ways that the original poster might respond to the issue of people not seeing notes or overlooking the intention (communicating with the IDer, making sure that uploaded photos clearly indicate the subject, etc.). It seems to me in the context of this discussion of IDing, one reason why people sometimes fail to notice notes is because we are dealing with what often feels like an overwhelming number of observations in need of attention. If we felt less of a need to provide as many IDs as possible, we might find it easier to take our time looking at individual observations. So the suggestions that one might consider contributing more IDs oneself are perhaps not just about a plea to better understand the decisions that IDers make before criticizing them, but also about the possibility that this might contribute in however small a way to reducing the imbalance that leads to IDers overlooking things.
Regarding misidentifications, I have learned so much from identifiers in iNat, and being a ‘person that knows about plants’ between my friends, I keep learning how much I don’t know. But I try to identify at least a bit (I have double IDs than observations, although I add many ‘Angiospermae’ or ‘Lepidoptera’ IDs).
I try to get the local observations as close to a definitive ID as my knowledge allows, but many times I make mistakes. That is why I try to keep up with the notifications and when I see somebody has ID something that is not mine, I open the observation again to see if I made a mistake, or learn more about the species.
I wanted to share a link to see your ‘maverick IDs’ (observations where your ID is different to several other IDs) but I cannot find it anymore!
Can somebody share a link to see my maverick IDs? Thanks!
Finally, a confession: for some observers that do not identify, or do not take detailed fotos… I may have gone to the trouble of marking all their observations as ‘reviewed’ to get them out of sight, and concentrate on other observations!
Put your own name in this instead of mine. Your question reminded me that I should have checked myself. It’s been too long. Found I had a lot of them. Most were more or less embarrassing misidentifications, but I have no idea how I managed to ID a Bufflehead (duck) as a legume (plant).
Thanks! I had lost it and I managed to get some more since last time I checked. I cleaned it up and learned a bit more. And I added it to my bookmarks!
That happens all the time. I learn by essentially hanging around the people who know more than I do. Currently one of the best bee identifiers on the platform followed some of us around on here and now, we all consult her opinion. I have people all the time who DM me with questions for how I got a particular ID, or how to separate similar species, and conversely: I ask people for advice on subjects that I’m weak on. Most identifiers that I’ve dealt with are more than willing to help.
That is what I’m asking. I do not see how the place that we ended at with the shared living space analogy is meant to be applied to the topic at hand. What is your suggestion when it comes to iNaturalist?
Please point to a specific example where I have said that it’s not fine?
We aren’t talking about people who just quietly observe things. I have no gripes with them. But the thread that we are currently in doesn’t concern an average iNatter. It concerns a rather specific type of person and situation.
How do you imagine that? Should I slap sticky notes to my PC screen with names and avatars of every user who ever dared to mildly annoy me and doublecheck every observation I identify to make sure whoever posted it is not on my “don’t deal with them” list?
The difference between iNaturalist and our theoretical cockroach infested apartment is that there’s no other iNaturalist on the market. This shared space is all we’ve got, and if we don’t clean and maintain it properly, it will fall apart and we’ll all have to live on the street.
That is a pretty funny question to ask in a “Read the notes!” thread at the end of a long comment chain regarding this exact topic. Did you not have a chance to read through the previous comments you’re replying to yet? This is unproductive. I think we need to stop this conversation until you’ve had a chance to properly acquaint yourself with it.
) but yeah, thats my take on this
I’m in awe of the people who do the heavy lifting on IDs, and figured that was part of how they work their magic. I like to add annotations as well, especially for some taxa like lepidoptera, so the thumbnail method wouldn’t work for that anyway.