That would be good. For my bird submissions, I often get a confirming ID or initial ID from a reviewer even before I’m done editing the record.
2 Likes
Just checking, do you have auto-upload disabled in your app settings?
I just checked and it is enabled. Should I disable that?
Edit: I only upload using the + sign to access photos already on file, never in the field, and always just one at a time, for whatever that’s worth. (?)
Yeah when it’s enabled, it will try to upload your observations in the middle of you editing them, as you described. If you disable it then you can load up 10-20 observations at once, have them all ready, then upload them in one go.
2 Likes
And if people have decided there’s no point looking through them, that automatically cuts off from identification all the easily-identifiable photos which just happen to have been given an initial ID in the wrong family - which happens not infrequently. I think it’s worth bearing in mind that while some broad IDs are given because people really don’t know (whether because of poor photo quality or other reasons), there are also others that are simple to ID but are there because the CV guessed wrong and someone has corrected it.
4 Likes
Those would include Plant Disagreements (for example, tweak filters to suit) - which can be found and encouraged with an ID closer to the right one.
Thanks for the link - I’ll have to have a look at them for Australia. I’m getting the impression that there’s a lot of extra filtering you can do with urls that I don’t know about yet…
1 Like
There is another thread running - with more ideas
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/for-prolific-identifiers-whats-your-daily-weekly-process/58618/22
Maybe you could look at https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/placeholder-backup for Australia? Approx 2K
I think a lot of plant observations end up at Dicot (or Monocot or Fern or Moss or whatever) because they can’t be identified any further, even by competent, experienced identifiers. Sometimes I look at Dicots in my region and once in a long while, I can refine the ID further, but not often. And yet I know my limits as a plant identifier (I have lots!), so I don’t mark such observations As Good As Can Be. After a few years, these observations pile up higher and higher, so people get the impression that no one ever looks at them.
5 Likes
Here in the Forum, we can see, how many people look at a link in a comment.
But we cannot see, how many people have looked at an obs (not even our own). I asked, but iNat won’t show us that. For an identifier it would be useful to show, gazillions have looked at that and moved on. As an observer, it could prompt me to offer the necessary field marks in future.
PS that new button for Summarize is very good. Bringing this thread down to one coherent and informative paragraph!
1 Like
Exactly this. The only pile that might feasibly be reduced to zero, given a sufficient number of IDers, is verifiable observations without an ID (“unknowns”), because it is always possible to either add an ID (even that of “life”) or make them casual. For everything else, whether at kingdom or class or even lower levels, there will always be some percentage of observations that IDers do not manage to resolve because the photo quality is lacking or they are tricky for other reasons, and these will tend to become more over time. If we accept this and adjust our expectations accordingly, the task of IDing becomes much less disouraging and frustrating than if we approach it with a belief that it should be possible to reduce these piles to zero.
There are lots of legitimate reasons why people don’t always mark observations as “ID cannot be improved” (including not wanting to make observations casual just because the ID is above family level), though I think there would probably be benefits if experts would use it more often for observations at genus or lower when they know that there is not enough evidence to determine the species.
We’ve had this discussion before.
There is a nontrivial problem of how to determine whether someone has “seen an observation and moved on”: Does just looking at thumbnails in Explore or Identify count or do they have to mark it as reviewed? What about people who go through a lot of observations to annotate them but are not trying to ID them?
Beyond this, the fact that someone has seen an observation and maybe even marked it as reviewed says very little about whether the observation is in fact identifiable to someone with the relevant expertise.
Some people use the “mark reviewed” function as a way of removing the observations of taxa they are not interested in from their Identify searches. Specialist users may skim observations that have a broad ID in order to pull out the ones that are relevant to them – e.g., I often browse broadly ID’d hymenoptera to find the bees and aculeate wasps, but there are numerous hymenopteran families I simply don’t know enough about to narrow the ID. A reasonable portion of these observations are probably identifiable, but I am not the right person to do so. It would be a mistake to assume that because I have seen an observation but not added an ID, it means anything more than, say, that ants all look pretty much alike to me or that I haven’t spent any time learning about sawfly larvae.
5 Likes
Meanwhile, I can say if the obs has sat waiting 10 years for an ID, many people have looked at it …
Wow, thank you for enlightening me on this feature! I appreciate your help.
3 Likes
I’ve found perfectly good, IDable observations that were 5 years old or more.
Had many people had looked at these observations? Maybe, maybe not. What was clear is that nobody with even rudimentary expertise in the taxon had looked at them (Bombus, Apis mellifera).
For at least one of these observations, I got a thank you from the observer for looking at this really old observation, suggesting that it was not a case where it had been previously ID’d and the IDer had deleted their account. So it seems that sometimes things just get missed.
6 Likes
I too have wandered out of a room only to return hours later and find a cold cup of tea languishing on the counter, or worse a half-finished observation accidentally posted as an unknown open on my phone.
What pains me most about the unknowns is the knowledge that many of them come from people new to the app, who are perhaps new to and intimidated by the higher levels of taxonomy. I wish I could magically appear beside them and give some advice to help their observations be identified quickly (thus making it more likely they will stay on inat), but I, unlike many, cannot teleport and so must be satisfied with leaving a comment with my broad ID.
And then there are the observations with multiple species, left at unknown until someone comments “please split”, by which point the observer is already inactive due to the discouraging lack of identifications on their observations.
4 Likes
Are you included in the
Identification Pilot: Onboarding New Users
?
Very curious to read the feedback on that in a few weeks time.
2 Likes
Dumb question: what is the aim with this project? I gather that you’re trying to use/salvage the content in placeholders, in the hope that it will lead to finer IDs (though my experience is that the majority are either vague ‘spider’ or wrong), but do observations get deleted from the project once IDs have been added, or will they just mount up and be impossible to usefully keep on top of? I’ve just had a bit of a look at those 2K and feel unsure where to start or what to do…
1 Like
They remain in the project unless actively removed.
For you - Mark as Reviewed - will clear them from your sight.
It is a purely random example. But of the first 16 obs we caught, 8 were tiny typos which I could ID. Half have useful info which iNat would have silently deleted.
One was a ‘helpful’ broad ID, which ignored the observer’s stated intention.
A typical example where the observer knows the sp, but for whatever reason, used placeholder. Perhaps in the field with poor internet connection?
In between, there are some missing sp to flag for curation. Please add … that would also be lost forever.
Where to start or what to do? I start with the ones that have an ID in the meantime. Compare the CID to the placeholder. Evaluate with your local or taxon knowledge. Help if you can or move on. For the obs that have no ID yet, you can use the placeholder text as an extra clue. Beetle or flower?
We haven’t got stats yet, but my impression is about half are useful text, perhaps all the way to sp. And half are ‘junk’.
PS I did clear the New Zealand ones during the Great Southern Bioblitz, but far too many for Australia.
PPS since it is a project, you can add it as another filter to your bookmarked search filters. If you prefer to approach it that way round.
1 Like
As an active identifier, I hate coming across those. Especially when subsequent IDs have continued to ignore the observer’s stated intention and instead refined the ‘helpful’ broad ID. If you feel tempted to do this, just try putting yourself in the observer’s shoes, and think of how you would feel to be on the receiving end of it.
3 Likes
no? Is there somewhere I can read about that?