with that kind of money raised, seems like paying IDers would be the thing to do tbh…
Not that I am advocating iNat get into that side of things, just that, if there were hundreds of thousands of dollars to encourage people to ID - paying the active ID’ers (who have a track record of good ID work - at whatever level they id i’m not just saying field experts but even those who sort through unknowns to broad categories) would be an interesting concept and likely spur more ID’ers.
I mean…it’s kinda a capitalist hellscape idea, and would probably overall change iNat not necesarily for the better, there are lots of reasons this is a horrible idea, but it is legit to the world we live in, so it would work…
I think I ran into the exact same person when starting IDing and was annoyed and confused as well by this weird behaviour… one could also communicate this in a more polite way. The person use very hurtful words for me back then as well. I mean, just write it in your picture description or on your profile or somewhere that you do not wish others to interfere with your weird workflow… or at least approach someone just trying to help in a resepctful manner…
I love @lynnharpers solution to filter those people and mark as reviewed. Such a simple solution, but it never dawned on me … will do this regularly now with people on my blacklist. Thanks for the advice!
The big “no evidence” pile I had unmarked and reevaluated is now at the stage where I’ve coarsely id’ed a lot of landscapes and such, and marked most of them “as good as can be”. This means that 1 person’s simple agreement or refinement of my id will file the record into Casual until the observer comes back to clarify or refine later.
@lynnharper@sunguramy@esant@egordon88 or anyone else interested in “tag teaming” for the 2nd id- feel free to click! I may have missed some “good as can be” clicks but can come back to get them later.
Thanks all for helping put these years-old items to bed for now! It’s a shame when we get enthusiastic new identifiers who quickly get demoralized by a big swath of hard to tackle obs at the back of the pile. (BTW if you are a new identifier also demoralized by a crusty expert and don’t know how to filter them out, let me know because I might have the particular url chunk you need. ;) )
I’ll look through, I saw some of yours pop up in Alabama, and commented / checked things a few days ago. So those if you saw again and agreed or such, may have cleared as it won’t pull it off the pile with a life + dqa it seems
ETA: the first link I have none showing, so I must have reviewed them already
ETA 2 - oh i had to uncheck alabama xD I will say a few i voted that they could be improved to prevent move to casual - a few show some trees or such pretty plainly, so being sorted correctly may get a second ID’er who can move them along, or like one with a really pretty i’m sure ID’able plant in good focus.
The page count at the bottom of the second link is reduced by about 20 pages since it excludes all of mine. It’s a good way to avoid identifying for repeat problematic observers.
Sadly, that includes some people who are on the forum and have participated in discussions about that.
This. iNaturalist doesn’t have to be all things to all people. Really. My life list “in real life” is many, many times longer than my iNat life list. If IDs fail to magically appear, either I will be bothered enough to go and do my own research, or I will let it go because I’m looking at something else by then anyway.
Well, for the ones who are here mainly to recieve IDs, I would tend to agree. It’s hard to agree, though, that this should also apply to some of the observers Amy mentioned, who may not be that concerned with IDs. This observation, for example, definitely shows connecting with the natural world; but I wouldn’t assume that they want to know the exact Linnaean binomial.
Sure, why not. Just be sure to make it a gig with qualifications, and some means of screening applicants to ensure that they are qualified. Perhaps you are familiar with the term, parataxonomist?
iNat has goals of both connecting people with nature and generating scientifically usable data. When those two goals are/were in conflict, we do tend to favor the usability/social side of things, but I think the thousands of papers that have cited iNat data via GBIF show that the iNat community generates quality data at scale, although yes, of course it’s not perfect.
There are trade-offs if you go in either direction. I’m glad there’s a rigorous top-down place like BugGuide, but I’m also glad iNat has a more expansive take on participation. There’s room for all kinds of approaches and communities and I don’t think they necessarily need to be in competition with each other.
I don’t have much else to do right now, I can help you go through some of these landscapes.
Ooh, appreciate the tip! I’ll try to start utilizing this, thankfully my list of users to avoid isn’t THAT long yet, but at the least this can help me filter out my own observations
Thanks! I did use a broad brush at that scale, and so I appreciate any refinements!
Re counterticking against a “good as can be”, feel free to just tag me from this set. If I come through later and remove my mark, then the leftover “can improve” countermark can throw things off on its own.
I didn’t mean to say it doesn’t generate excellent data, it’s just different focus.
By museum I mean the top-down assume zero mistakes kind of data. :)
Tons of good data that can be sorted to excellent, is just as good and arguably better in longrun than a modicum of excellent data, cause in the end there’ll likely be more data points from the larger set. So just trade offs.
In the case of this observation showing a notebook I think identiflying as “Life” is not adequate (and consequently flagging as “No, it’s as good as it can be” is not adequate either) but flagging as “Evidence of organism” “No” was adequate.
This observation is identifiable as “Bryophyta” and a knowledgeable person might still refine a bit the identification. I think “Life” + “No, it’s as good as it can be” was not adequate.
Anyway, I agree that in these particular cases this won’t change our knowledge of nature, but might change a little bit the relation of the observer to iNat?
Oof. I hear ya. I have a person who I skip over, too. Tried to pull a long-neglected observation up to (at least) genus, and got the Mean Girls ™ clique treatment. Responding to friends whilst ignoring me, insinuating that I wasn’t sufficiently knowledgable to ID; that sort of thing.
Thanks for the link to the bug guide article. It was very interesting.
I know that there is a lot of misinformation about iNaturalist because I came here based on some of that misinformation. (“iNaturalist is a place to get your photos identified.” As opposed to, it’s a place that helps you learn to ID your photos.)
It would take major revamping of the site (and the site revampers are already overloaded) but I would like for people that are new to iNat to have to go through a tutorial probationary period. They could be limited in how many observations they could submit in a day. (That would short circuit the school classes that require them to submit a certain [large] number.) They would get feedback on the observations they submit. (All those things that volunteer identifiers are trying to tell them in comments now - i.e., photos must be in focus, organism centered, most of the background cropped out, captured/cultivated must be identified, don’t automatically agree with an ID just because you are clueless, etc.) Their observations are not added to the site and they don’t get access to the full site until they show that they understand the basics of how the site works.
Basically, intensive feedback at the front end. As opposed to full access from the beginning with no restrictions, which guarantees that people like me will stumble around on this very complicated web site, making many mistakes (or, like me, making all the mistakes) and what instructional data there is, is in the form of pages of text to read [from a base of zero knowledge and few similar websites for comparison]. And all that bumbling around stresses and discourages the people who are volunteering their time to add value to this website and not only trying to play catch up on identifications but also trying to play catch up on educating the website users.
New users would have a goal/reward to work toward. (iNat does try to recognize/reward “good” behavior - look at all those badges that I didn’t even notice that I have.)
I know a major revamp like this is an impossible dream, but the current system seems to stand by and allow beginners to create havoc and the dedicated users to be exhausted and discouraged.