If the observer has opted out and the observer’s ID is maverick, it should make the observation casual, but there’s at least one bug where this doesn’t happen.
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It definitely doesn’t happen in cases where the observer has entered a broader ID and a dozen IDers have tried in vain to refine it, presumably because the observer’s ID is not technically in disagreement with the more specific ones.
Adding to this: As far as I know, it is not possible to search for observations by community taxon using any of the filters in the standard interfaces. The only place the community taxon is displayed is on the right sidebar of observation pages on the web view (not in Identify, not in the apps). There might be some url trick that one can use, but for all intents and purposes, this means that for most ways that people are going to be interacting with iNat, the observation taxon is what matters.
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Two IDs on an unknown opt out sends it to casual too.
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@Naelin thank you for educating me on this. I had no idea! Truly, I know it takes time to explain and type it all out. I’m super grateful!
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Thank you, @DianaStuder. I’ve never used this feature and can’t imagine doing so. I’d completely forgotten or didn’t know it exists. I did come across one observation like this and I actualy did waste my time trying to figure out where it was broken and who to report it to.
Thank you, as always, so much for your help and patience in explaining.
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Wouldn’t the aforementioned DQA option send that to RG?
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Not if people haven’t used the DQA. I was responding to a post that said the status is supposed to change automatically (i.e., without a DQA) in cases where the community ID disagrees with the observer’s ID.
Checking “ID cannot be improved” when the observer has opted out and the community ID is not the same as their ID will make observations casual, not RG. If it made them RG based on the community ID, this would be ignoring the observer’s choice to reject the community ID, thus essentially rendering this option meaningless. If it made observations RG based on the observer’s broader ID, this would be ignoring the community consensus.
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I agree, but will note that this is potentially resolvable (to some extent) if the CID were the ID transferred to GBIF. Unfortunately, it is still the Observation ID that is transferred. Otherwise, opting out could allow the Observation ID to remain on iNat as the display/classification for the observer, and the CID (which is determined by the larger community) to go to GBIF. This might introduce some confusion for someone looking at the GBIF record and coming to iNat to examine it. But I mention because changing the ID export to GBIF from Observation to Community (which I am strongly in favor of) would help (though not totally) address this issue with optouts as well as other issues.
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Yes. I was pointing out that in this scenario, the community ID does not technically disagree with the observer’s ID. Actually, you used that phrasing, too: “the observer’s ID is not technically in disagreement with the more specific ones.” Which means that it is not the same scenario.
It is not a fundamentally different scenario: there is a disagreement in the sense that the observer ID and the community consensus are not the same – or to put it another way: if the observer has opted out intentionally, this implies that they disagree with the community consensus even if there is not a “disagreement” in the sense of an active taxonomic conflict.
And I don’t understand the relevance of mentioning the DQA when it was a question of under what conditions automatic mechanisms come into play. I was not suggesting that there is no way to deal with observations where the observer fails to update their ID, since strategies for doing so have already been covered thoroughly in the discussion. But solutions that require users to manually click on DQA items for individual observations are different than an automatic and more systematic solution. It seems to me that this thread was motivated in a large part by a desire for the latter.
The fact that the automatic mechanism does not come into effect in such cases (the way it does when the observer’s ID is maverick) has important practical implications: where the observer who entered a broad ID is unresponsive (as, in my experience, is not uncommon with prolific users who globally opt out on principle, even when observing taxa they are not knowledgeable about), it requires that IDers notice that the observation ID is not being updated even though there is already a community consensus. Often enough they do not, or they do not understand why the observation is not behaving as expected (e.g. in Identify, there is no way to see that the users has opted out). If this is the case, they will not check the DQA box because they don’t know to do so (and if they do, it will make such observations casual and not RG). So it is a less than ideal solution and worth pointing out that existing mechanisms do not address such cases.