I encounter this, from the uploader’s perspective, every time I add a large volume of observations. As mentioned a few times above, I think a relatively short waiting period before displaying other people’s “Unknowns” in Identify would be one very helpful change. If I add 75 observations via mobile in a little outing, there’s no way I’m going to be typing in the taxon names at the same time. It’s far, far quicker for me to use the Identify page to add IDs from my computer than it is to use my clumsy thumbs while hiking. It’s also way easier to add IDs from Identify than it is from the web uploader. By the time they’re uploaded and I get to my observations on the Identify page, folks have already started adding coarse IDs that weren’t all that necessary since I just needed a few minutes to add the IDs myself.
We could bring back the “ID Please” checkbox, not to totally exclude it from Identify if it’s not checked, but to slightly weight observations higher in the Identify page when people actually want IDs, vs. people who don’t really care as much about other people adding IDs/getting Research Grade immediately.
In summary, a few ideas from above that I liked, and a few of my own, that would be useful to me as an observer and IDer:
-Provide guidance on apps to at least add coarse ID, but let experienced users ignore if they want
-Provide guidance on web uploader to at least add coarse ID (already done, but message needs tweaking)
-Make it easier to add IDs quickly from the web uploader (more like Identify)
-Add a slight delay before other users’ “Unknowns” show up in Identify
-Or a longer, private “draft” mode, but do not allow drafts in perpetuity
-Use computer vision to automatically assign a kingdom to Unknowns; but overwrite at first human ID
-“Unknown” may not be unknown, just “not identified”, so consider a semantic change there
-Weight observations in Identify higher if folks actually want help with the ID
-Sort observations by number of users who have reviewed them, to help specifically deal with cases like “Unknowns” that should be marked as no evidence of organism or coarsely IDed + community cannot improve