I really appreciate the IDs that have been elevated from unknown to my specific fields of expertise! I do sometimes go through unknowns, but not as regularly as I would have to, to find all the observations I could help with. So yes, eliminating the unknowns is for sure an important and very helpful task that contributes a lot to getting observations to RG.
Unfortunately, the more specific it gets, the less IDers there are, explaining the situation Diana observed
There is no such tag - “unknown” is simply the default for anything that gets uploaded without an ID. It takes another step to put an ID on something that some people are just not aware about, too lazy or reluctant to do (“what if I get it wrong and everyone will know how stupid I am?”). Sometimes there are technical issues and it doesn’t work, as evidenced by observations that have placeholder IDs only.
Sorting these into broader categories is a helpful activity, not silly at all. I often skip the most recent week/month of uploads though because sometimes uploaders are still working on those IDs and don’t appreciate someone jumping ahead of them with a broad category.
Identifying skills across iNat range all the way.
From - I am rewriting the taxonomy for … and I am The Expert on My Taxon.
Across people like me - yes, almost always have some sort of idea What That is but I do bring my utter mysteries hopefully to iNat!
Down to the enthusiastic newbies, who are still learning to iNat. Or daunting marine life - no idea where to slot that in. Or I know it is That taxon but where or how to find it on iNat?? Tiniest typos are not forgiven by iNat, where Google tries to help with - did you mean this?
As a noob struggling with learning to lower my ‘unknown’ pile I am keenly aware on how relative that term is on iNat, but I don’t see how that relativity can ever really change, and that the optimistic intent is to move as many out of the ID lands of the ‘Great Unknown’.
I struggled a couple times today with a spider that I couldn’t get close to, even with external references (I could have looked harder perhaps?) and I was going to go with a close visual that was never seen in my region (let alone my backyard, at least for me). So I went with the genus and I hope some spider-person can help.
Then I found another strange ‘growth’ on a bush and after my recent struggle with what I thought was a moss, but turned out to be a gall growth on poison ivy (and again, the first time ever observed in my area), I spent a lot of time looking through different gall pics until I came up with something that I’m pretty sure is not the exact thing. Again, like the original poster, I’m hoping that a slightly off species guess is more likely to be spotted than just ‘unknown’, if indeed, it is a gall!
I sometimes successfully used Google image search when I am really sure that the iNat CV results are ‘not even in the park’, and I wondered if that is a good idea or not. From what I have found, sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t.
I’m also wondering about how so many observers tend to specialize to favourite taxa very quickly, and I’m not sure if I want to do that --yet.
And unfortunately, the stuff I’m getting attracted too (slime molds, galls, fungi) are often the ones that are hardest for the beginner to jump in on.
I think I have concluded that the reason say, there’s hardly any slime mold observations in my area is that very few are interested, or if they were, they got frustrated and switched to something a little easier to work with.
But, I am still happily making my way up Mt. Stupid.
Thank God for all the experienced ID Sherpas!
I observe a lot of galls, but I’ve only learned a few to the species level. What I do is add my gall observations to the Galls of North America project, where people who know their galls tend to give IDs quickly. It helps to know at least the genus of the plant the gall is on, however, and the project will ask you for that when you add your observation.
As for other unknowns, please feel free to just call something Spiders or Beetles or Arthropods. I call many of the galls I find Arthropods and while sometimes it turns out the gall is actually caused by a fungus (oops), most of the time Arthropod is correct (whew!).
And just keep on learning - you are doing it right!
Thanks for that project reference Lynn, and also for the kind words of encouragement. (I’ll be sure to mention your support on my next tumble down the cliffs of Mt. Stupid. Which means… pretty soon.)
What a great idea!
Laudable work!
I just started doing this when I saw another recent thread about it. I hope that I will learn as I do this.
But I have a question. What is the quickest/easiest way to find the “unknowns”? I can click on “Identify”, and I assume these are the newest added. A search for “unknown” doesn’t bring up anything. That is, it doesn’t seem to search at all. So what is the easies way to find the unknowns?
ETA: Oh, I see I asked this already in the other thread and am just seeing the replies now. Please disregard my question, and thank you all, anyway.
Thank you!
The web site warns you that you’ve left off an important thing (ID, date, location) but you can upload without fixing it.
What I’m more surprise by is people who put the identification in the description or as placeholder text but not the ID field. I guess that they’re working offline and plant to go back, but I got there first.
Sorting the Unknowns is considered a valuable public service. And I learn a lot doing it, especially when I’m wrong.
One thing I encourage you to do is to set the “reviewed” flag for things you skip over because you don’t have a clue. Otherwise, these observations just pester you over and over again. Sometimes I Favorite those observations if I want to know what they turn out to be.
sometimes that is a tiny typo - just the one letter wrong or missing - iNat is UNforgiving.
You can Fave or Follow an obs where you want to watch the ID discussion unfold.
I can Coleoptera … and in a couple of hours it went to (quiet whoops) a new genus for iNat!
The main issue I have with going back to Reviewed items in the Identify view is that they are all grayed out, so it’s hard to re-review them in the thumbnail view while trying to pick things out of the big pile.
I wonder if there’s a way to just de-obscure the thumbnails in that view, without using the mark unreviewed/ mark reviewed again button - which sends requests to the database and can take a while?
Instead of Favoriting observations if you want to know what they turn out to be, you can Follow them. That has the advantage (or is it disadvantage?) of not putting them into your Favorites list.
View as Reviewed?
One thing I encourage you to do is to set the “reviewed” flag for things you skip over because you don’t have a clue. Otherwise, these observations just pester you over and over again. Sometimes I Favorite those observations if I want to know what they turn out to be.
This is a great tip, although I’d offer a counter-example from my own experience. As a newer iNatter who doesn’t have a formal biology background, I’ve been slowly learning about local taxa in part by going through observations and identifying what I can. Especially with plants, I’ve found that I’ve started to be able to go back to observations I initially had no clue about and now be able to offer at least a broad ID. Maybe I’ve seen other posts since then with comments on what to look for, or with pictures that made clear a feature I hadn’t noticed. Either way I feel keeping them around to look at is often valuable–for me, revisiting is part of the accumulation of knowledge.
You can always see them again by setting your filters to show you observations you have marked as reviewed.
So I do what Jason suggests to keep thinga tidy for myself. I mark the entire page “reviewed” that i looked at. If at a later time I become confident with the ID of something new, in the filter (say its a plant, or dicot or whatever I knew I was marking it as) and set filter to “reviewed” and set taxa to “dicot” or whatever. Then they show back up. It doesnt erase your history to set as reviewed it just hides it unless you unhide it :)
You’re absolutely right. I do this too, and it really helps. It happens that I make the basic identification of an observation several months old, and the real identification came within the next hours.
It also happened once that somebody sent me a message to remove a wrong identification of a flying thingie, because it was the third observation of the species in history, the previous two coming from the 1950s :)
You can just hit the “mark all as unreviewed” button and it will just toggle the grayout for that page.