I think this is a really good way to express my ID philosophy as well…thanks for writing it out!
I definitely disagree with “If you can acknowledge a possibility that it could be sp. ‘xxxx’, then you should not explicitly disagree.” In many cases, there’s a very small chance that almost certainly incorrect ID’s could be correct (released pet, etc.), but that very small chance is not a good basis for making an ID. It could apply in almost any situation.
I think a good suggestion as to how to disagree comes from the wording iNat itself gives: “Is the evidence provided enough to confirm this is sp. ‘xxx’?” If there isn’t enough evidence, people should feel free to disagree and should provide a decent reason why. In many cases, the RG genus level record is still quite useful.
I do think it requires a high level of expertise in a given taxon to make that call though.
Here’s another… we have a National Great Kereru Count, to log observations of our native wood pigeon. Iconic bird with little chance of being mis-ID’d as something else (assuming it is seen within 50m), plenty of literature and media to promote the week long event and it is for only the one species, so I would be fine with confirming on those.
Yeah the problem with this is it only really works for either high level experts or really obvious cases like super blurry ones. A lot of times I can’t tell and someone else can. And people have been getting weird and preachy about photos that aren’t pretty but are still perfectly valid. For that reason i think an explicit disagree based on “insufficient evidence” should only be done in very certain cases.
Folks have been surprisingly pleasant about the Junco clean-up - I think part of that definitely comes from giving some explanation as to why the taxon is bumped back up to species :)
I’ve unfortunately been blocked by two other users for correcting their species-level IDs (not bumping them back to genus but actually correcting an incorrect Research Grade ID to the correct species). Another topic entirely, but I still think those abuses of the ‘block’ feature are a short-coming of iNat that allows users to hack the community ID process by shielding their observations from correction.
This is against the Community Guidelines, so if you suspect this has been done to you, please email help@inaturalist.org.
Thanks, Tony. I did previously report these, as you suggested when I reached out a while back.