Hi Jessica,
now I finally recognize that my proposal is overkilling and untenable.
Perhaps, more than my ill-conceived proposal itself, it’s the emerging concerns that make this discussion so insightful and precious.
To say one, it allowed me to get a better grasp of what iNat is about.
An opportunity for which I’m grateful.
Cesare
I think part of the confusion stems from the definition of “identifying”. I suppose, for you Cesare as expert, it means “identifying to species”, but here on iNat even non-experts like me can help with identifying. In your field of expertise I would probably ID something which is posted as insect as Ensifera or Caelifera - or maybe to family. Then the real experts have the possibility to find their specialty. Their time is too valuable to sort through thousands of photos of presumably insects to find some grasshoppers.
If there was a badge - which then I wouldn’t have - I suppose I would stop IDing alltogether. But through this broad identifying I have learnt a lot, because I get notifications if something is IDed futher. And it gives me a good feeling. :-) Like after years of sitting around as unidentified I have helped bring it to the attention of somebody who knows what it is! And next time I might remember… or directly tag a relevant person, who might even be happy to see it.
This is my primary concern reading this and similar threads → going from one mode to the other.
First and foremost, I apologize to anybody who may have felt offended. When I cited iNat self-referentiality, I didn’t mean to be argumentative. I was trying to summarize in an unbiased way the conclusions derived from all the answers that accumulated in this thread.
My limited command of the English language - and probably the choice of the wrong metaphor - caused a radical misunderstanding. “Crossing swords” in my intention referred to “challenging an ID provided by someone else”.
My iNaturalist record is still scanty but anybody can see that I’m not haughty. I gladly interact with anybody, I uploaded my best Orthoptera pictures as well as all the sounds that I previously contributed to Xeno-Canto.org. I accepted corrections by more competent people, and I provided better IDs whenever I could, in most cases accompanied by short explanations. Actually, I began sharing images and observations since the early 2000’s on the Tree Of Life website. My personal website is a mess, but there too my intention of sharing information with anybody should emerge clearly.
No worries, I’m not offended, but I do think it’s quite a negative assumption/misreading to make of how iNaturalist works, especially if one such as yourself is quite new to how things work! x
‘Crossing swords’ is a phrase in English too, though admittedly I see it less and less - what I was taken aback by was, reading between the lines, you aren’t willing to challenge or consider IDs made by people who are considered to be less competent. I think it’s worth pointing out the number of times I’d come across IDs made by people who, according to your criteria, would be deemed experts, which to me (someone who is competent and proficient, but falls short of the expert label) were incorrect - and it turned out that the IDs made by the experts had been incorrect! If my (labelled) competency were a factor in being taken seriously, these observations wouldn’t have been adjusted to the correct ID. I’m assuming that I’ve understood you correctly here
I see that this topic has been marked solved, so I’ll leave it here. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day
He said he was not willing to challenge id’s by people he thinks are more competent, which is also a problem.
You may perhaps not realise - that iNat curators are volunteers. And not necessarily all qualified as your ‘experts’.
There are issues around some iNat taxonomy problems - which are locked to a particular curator. (I am not a curator, but have tripped over some of the problems)
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/require-a-comment-when-adding-a-coarser-id-to-an-observation/45736/5
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-respond-to-comments-by-experts/27819/6
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/general-consesus-on-being-asked-to-fix-ones-id/14609/19
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identification-tips-for-ids/29796/21
and there are many more
https://forum.inaturalist.org/search?q=explain%20reason%20for%20ID
Meanwhile we have piles of Unknown and Needs ID. Identifiers chose where they prefer to put their effort. Whether expert, or not.
The hard part is people keep making the same argument over the years, so i think others get kind of tired of it.
I’ll be the blunt one as usual. Merit-based reputation is great, but academia’s ‘reputations’ and who is considered an expert often has very little to do with merit. Not always, but often enough that elevating academics as the go-to experts would ruin this website for its stated purpose.
Thinking ‘why can’t there be a place for these academic experts to have their say and control the dialog?’? well, there is and it’s literally all of the rest of the ecology world except for iNaturalist. Why not just have one place where people’s actions speak for themselves? Even on here some academics are absolutely awful bullies to others, to the point i’ve almost left the site. And to be clear many would automatically give me a badge too, as i’ve got a masters and am one of the prominent experts on certain ecosystems. I don’t want it. I’d probably leave the site if I were given it.
inat needs to be a meritocracy to work. Many other similar sites did go the routes of designating experts. And why are you here instead of there? Easy. They all failed. You don’t even know about them because they are gone.
It very much is, just try challening a few academics on here if you don’t believe me. And it’s even worse with those not on iNat.
A possible solution to this would be to base identifier leaderboards on “improving” identifications rather than all identifications, or somehow surface this information more readily (or, “improving” plus “leading”, although that has potential to encourage erroneous leading IDs). It would be a bit more complex to explain than the total number of IDs.
I 100% get where you’re coming from, I’ve had some academics have some wildly overblown reactions to me correcting IDs, despite the fact that others who also had experience backed me up, to the point that I’ve hesitated when confronted with an ID that, to me, is simply incorrect but the poster considers themself an ‘expert’.
I’m mostly critical of the idea he puts forward that experts are ‘afraid’ of being challenged by people who are simply inexperienced, due to their inexperience rather than their conduct, and then having to account for they chose that identification. I feel like if he was referring to users who get aggressive that would have been mentioned at some point. The general gist I seem to understand that this is more about the importance of respecting academic/‘expert’ credentials (to him) than it is of users becoming aggressive. See:
But this shift of paradigm would, in my opinion, entirely change the perception of iNaturalist by all those academical and non-academical people who are afraid (with some reason…) that joining iNaturalist implies the possibility of being challenged by inexpert people, and this in turn would require defending one’s identification.
You summed it up really nicely here:
Thinking ‘why can’t there be a place for these academic experts to have their say and control the dialog?’? well, there is and it’s literally all of the rest of the ecology world except for iNaturalist. Why not just have one place where people’s actions speak for themselves?
This is where the enhancement suite for Chrome comes in really really handy as it does just that…allows one to see how many IDs a person has that are leading, improving, or supporting.
That’s very useful, thanks! Might even persuade me to switch to using Chrome more often, instead of my default Firefox…
Yeah, admittedly it’s hard to know the emotions behind why people behave why they do. Some seem more offended than afraid. Others i think really don’t like being questioned. And i won’t lie, i also think it’s scary to have so much stuff out there that might be wrong, especially given i’ve used this site for over a decade and made some early career IDs i might not still agree with or feel like I could justify. Where I really feel people get angry and afraid is when i question the way academics do taxonomy… but that is probably too much a divergence to talk about here too much. But it’s kind of the same cloud of issues.
In short, for a variety of reasons there are a LOT of iNat users, especially power users, who either have a very rigid concept of how social status and reputation should work, or else just plain don’t see social status at all. That means it’s impossible to both set up an overarching top-down reputation system and also keep the open ended and semi-democratic nature of the site. You make it more friendly to academics, you will lose a lot of marginalized people that the site supposedly wants here. This has been a long-arching theme of the site where I used to be on the side of wanting more academic rigor than was present, and was often told “the site is primarily for connecting people wtih nature, not for creating data for scientific studies, the latter is just a secondary benefit of the site”. I have a hard time reconciling this because i saw no stated change in mission, but have observed a gradual change to the site being far more academic than i think it should be, including taxonomic schemes that are not usable by anyone other than experts and sometimes even adopting the awful academic trend of giving people a free pas for violating rules and treating community members badly, because they are ‘important experts’. As someone on the edge of the academic world i see that and back away, which is why i use the site way less than I used to. I can only imagine more marginalized people than I would be even more pushed away, and i think many have been. I’m a white, male looking US citizen so that places me in a way safer place than most potential users of the site, in terms of marginalization, but it also means i shouldn’t speak for others so i respect that too.
I’m glad that the debate is still going on, but it has taken an entirely different turn than I expected.
That’s good, but as the initiator of this thread, at the risk of overexplaining things, I feel compelled to provide one last clarification.
Initially, I was trying to take to the iNat community attention the following concern by outside experts: “If nobody understands that I’m not improvising, if nobody understands that my ID is based on years of studies, then someone will try to educate me. Since I am a kind a collaborative person, then I will have to disappoint my interlocutor, I will have to catechize him by explaining the detailed reasons why I proposed the identification. Providing an ID is a quick thing, but will remain a quick thing only as long as I shan’t be required to defend every proposal of mine by providing extensive explanations. Perhaps, if my ID is accompanied by some indication that it comes from an expert, the community will consider it as reliable without asking any further detail”.
My impractical approach, “Give me an expert badge” was demolished for reasons that now I too deem obvious. True, now I agree: it cannot be done.
I tried an alternative approach, “So, any time I ID something, I will gladly accept to be required to explain why I provided that specific id: my explanation may convince the community that my ID is reliable. By providing it immediately, I will not be obliged to provide it later”.
I now admit that the alternative approach is equally impractical and - according to many of you - could result in losing tons of observations. I shan’t either advocate that idea anymore.
It seems to me that the last posts address an entirely different issue: outside scientists that get offended by the fact that their IDs are challenged. Scientists full of themselves who feel that their honor is at stake, and who see being corrected as a crime of lese-majesty.
It’s perfectly good to discuss here (or elsewhere) and now (or anytime) about the susceptibility of arrogant scientist. But it should be clear that what I’ve been trying to talk about has more to do with the loss of time than with the loss of honor.
Thanks for your patience!
Cesare
There might be a misunderstanding here, or a different view on how things work or should work. Nobody is ever required to defend anything.
If someone disagrees with an ID of mine, I can just ignore that. And in obvious cases I often will do that. 99% of these cases sort itself out over time. Well, they don’t sort themselves out of course, the community does. (Of course how well this works this may depend on taxon and location.) In interesting cases I won’t ignore it, because a) I want the correct ID in iNat and b) I might learn something. In those cases I will try to judge what kind of disagreement this is and I will either explain my ID or tag other IDers that I trust or both. (It doesn’t take long to find out who these other IDers are.)
I should clarify that I am not an expert. But that is a relative thing and in my very small corner on the tree of life I know a lot more than the average person and a lot less than the true experts, a few of which I had the joy of interacting with on this site.
This. This is a huge part of what makes iNaturalist special for me: the fact that anyone can participate and learn at the level they are at.
It gets at the heart of what I consider to be the key contribution of citizen science: the fact that it brings together laypeople and scientists around a common interest. Observers aren’t just deliverers of data that is used by scientists; experts aren’t just there to put labels on observations and tell people what they saw. Rather – it is a dialogue between observer and IDers. It allows laypeople to actually participate in processes of scientific knowledge generation and gain insights into how science works. It takes science out of the laboratory and makes it something that has a place in people’s everyday experiences and activities. And it is an opportunity for experts to share knowledge about what they do with people who care.
Why should questions from inexperienced users be seen as a challenge to the authority of experts? Why are they a waste of time? Why not think about it instead as an opportunity to teach and share?
I’m someone who had always been interested in nature in a general sense, but had not intensively engaged with it in any systematic way before joining iNat. After a few initial bumps, I realized that I could contribute as an IDer, that this was something I could do that was meaningful and useful. I fairly quickly became one of the more active bee IDers in my part of Europe. This was not knowledge I started out with – I decided I wanted to learn more, I acquired literature, and I put in the time and effort to gain skill at it, though I still have much to learn. And I did this through my activities on iNat, with the help and patience of several other experienced local IDers, some of them working scientists, some of them not.
I would never have become involved in this way if there was a system that set “experts” on a different level from non-experts, or if the experts had felt it was a waste of time to engage with me.
To be clear: I don’t think IDers are obligated to provide an explanation with their IDs, whether agreeing or disagreeing, though it is of course courteous to do so when asked. But I think there are advantages to choosing to take the time to do so if the observer or other users indicate interest and I think it would be a mistake to see this as a burden or a waste of time.
But what you can’t determine is who on that leaderboard has seen that observation and marked it reviewed without leaving any other indication.
I’ve been wondering about that for a while. Do observations marked as reviewed really add to one’s identification total?
no they don’t. Jason is referring to users who may have reviewed an observation and ‘identified’ it, but without actually adding an explicit ID (because the ID was already correct and the observation at RG, thus the reviewer didn’t feel the need to add another ID), and thus these people’s ID count on the leaderboard is perhaps an underestimation of their (less tangible) contributions
Or because they felt that there was insufficient evidence to refine the ID further. Not everyone comments about that, especially if they review a lot of observations.