Hi all! I just checked my profile today, and saw that I am only 170 IDs from 25,000!! I was so excited, and what was even more interesting was that I found it nearly five times the amount of observations I had. This got me wondering: does the majority of the community use iNat in a similar way (Adding some obs, but spending more time ID’ing), is it the other way around, or is it somewhere in between?
This inspired me to make some polls that will hopefully show a bit of a correlation.
This is the first time I’ve actually made polls on here; I hope they’re okay!
How many observations have you made in your iNat career?
<100 observations made
100 to 499 observations made
500 to 999 observations made
1,000 to 4,999 observations made
5,000 to 9,999 observations made
10,000 to 49,999 observations made
50,000 to 99,999 observations made
100,000+
0voters
<100 ID’s made
100 to 499 ID’s made
500 to 999 ID’s made
1,000 to 4,999 ID’s made
5,000 to 9,999 ID’s made
10,000 to 49,999 ID’s made
50,000 to 99,999 ID’s made
100,000+
0voters
Please enter both polls to maintain poll accuracy!
<100 annotations made
100 to 499 annotations made
500 to 999 annotations made
1,000 to 4,999 annotations made
5,000 to 9,999 annotations made
10,000 to 49,999 annotations made
50,000 to 99,999 annotations made
100,000+ annotations made (Wow!)
0voters
Good idea guys!!
Thank you for your votes!!
Thanks for reminding me: our forum users are definitely, as a whole, a more active part of the iNat population. So this poll, while providing a unique perspective, may not be entirely accurate. It is interesting, though, to see how things look among the more active users. I was surprised to see how many people voting had over 100,000+ ID’s!!
No not at all. I don’t know any stats off the top of my head, but the majority of users make no IDs at all, or very few. Some one published a paper that I could probably find if I were on a computer instead of my phone. @thomaseverest maybe?
It is also worth noting that forum users do not represent the average iNat user.
Once again, the vocal minority is the main forum userbase
It would be interesting to measure observations to identification ratios instead, so that both can be analyzed per person instead of 2 separate polls that conclusions between the two can’t be taken
I know I’m a lil newbie here but I’m amazed how most voters have over 10k obs o.o
I only submit observations of spiders in a very urbanized country so maybe theres that, I wish I ever get to see that many specimens to be up there :D
Even so Id def say I spend most of my time adding obs, maybe I should start IDing more
I think forum users tend to skew heavily towards people who (also) ID because these tend to be a) highly active and dedicated users who thus are more likely to have a strong interest in iNat and talking about iNat and b) IDing tends to force one to become acquainted with the complexities and limitations of iNat, as well as the frictions that sometimes come with this, all of which people often find it useful to ask questions about and discuss.
iNat’s interface (apps and web) is structured to encourage observing – it is the first activity that most users engage in on iNat, and there are many more casual observers than there are casual IDers. People who ID are more likely to have something they want to accomplish by doing so (hardly anyone IDs completely at random, without any search filters at all), while observing may be a more unstructured, playful activity (go out and see what I find).
If you are familiar with the spider species in your urban area, I’m sure other users would appreciate you sharing your knowledge by adding IDs to their spider observations!
@mkanimallover you could add a third poll, asking for the individuals users proportion between observations and identifications (probably observations divided through identifications, since most user observe more than they identify, although there are exceptions)
Honestly, this is the biggest takeaway from this poll for me. We may have already known it, but this poll inadvertently still does a great job showing how big that (mis)representation actually is!
Agreed. I had an account and just observed for several years but had very few observations. Some fellow moth enthusiasts recruited me to start IDing to “clean up” some misidentification messes, and after a few hundred thousand IDs, I got way more into the platform and then started observing a lot more.
Is there an easy way to weight observation counts by how many ranks the ID did refine the the previous state? At the first glance my 25k IDs look like a big number for a layman, but most of them are like Unknown→Aves, Magnoliophyta→Brassicaceae etc. This is just curiosity, it probably doesn’t justify doing heavy programming or crawling the whole database.
I’m definitely a better observer than identifier, but I think identification is important to keep the community working in a healthy way. I try to keep my id:obs ratio above 1:2.
I’m approaching 2 years on the forum and on iNaturalist.org, but I also feel like a n00b, since I’m not a member of The Ten Thousand Club (at least 10k Observations and 10k IDs)
Welcome to the forum! Spiders are really cool, and there aren’t too many spider experts out there! Just keep chugging, and you’ll find your ID’s piling up!
Here are a couple of related threads, although I like the clarity of this thread, because it makes The Ten Thousand Club explicit. But if you want to read hundreds of replies:
