Not really novel… but users’ behavior is not a topic. ;)
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/school-homework-questions-on-the-forum/34848
We are a captive target for them.
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This forum thread does not deal with ‘school/homework assignments on the iNaturalist website’, though.
Right. It’s about human hybrid swarms. Or maybe tick prevention. ;-)
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“Lazy” observers seem the have evolved in 2014 ;-)
Just for the lulz I used my “unknown” search page (i.e. the dotted leaf which also includes microbes and other stuff that I just ignore) and changed the date to before 2014-01-01: almost nothing but well-IDd microbes, and things in “state of matter life” that probably are really hard. No weeds though. In 2014 recognizable stuff started to appear, but microbes still dominate (I went thru 2014-01-01 … 2016-12-31 using the time I usually need for a single day in 2023).
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This thread was not started with the purpose of complaining about observers who upload observations without an ID.
Note the “in defense of” and the quotation marks around “lazy” in the title.
It was started by a user who was concerned that it is “lazy” if they upload observations with an ID that is the best they can do based on their current state of active knowledge (i.e., without spending additional time researching the ID). They were feeling guilty because IDers had provided identification tips in the past which they did not always remember sufficiently well to apply when adding their own IDs to the current batch of observations.
In other words, it was about giving oneself permission to say “this is good enough right now” and “I don’t have to know everything”.
I think it’s important to remember that – with the possible exception of duress users – most users don’t deliberately post “poor” observations (blurry photos, weird or missing IDs, issues like multiple species in one observation or photos of one individual spread out across multiple observations, etc.). Some users are likely coming to iNat without much prior exposure to nature. Others may have more experience but still not initially understand how iNat works. This includes things that may seem obvious to you and me like the fact that it is a good idea to enter an ID and how one does this.
iNat has a learning curve; it takes time to become comfortable with the various features of the website and people join with varying levels of computer skills. In addition, some users access iNat primarily via Seek or the iOS app and are subject to the limitations of these interfaces.
For the changes you notice around 2014, you might look at the history of iNat and its user growth (there are some nice graphics on this somewhere, which I can’t find at the moment) and see if that offers any insights. Also, by virtue of having been around longer, older observations will have had more people looking at them and thus more opportunities to get an ID.
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That iNat learning curve continues. As we can see from queries in the Forum, and oh, I never knew you could do that, that way.
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When I go out to observe, I snap “everything that moves”. A lot of that is insects, which I will ID as the CV suggestion if it is “pretty sure” and it’s not obviously absurd from just looking at the taxon photo; if it’s not pretty sure, I usually put it to order.
I do not feel the least bad about doing this. iNaturalist is a platform to store observations - the ID aspect is only one aspect of it. I am glad for people who ID my observations, but if some remains unIDed, it doesn’t matter to me - maybe it will be useful to someone at some point in some way, or just to me to be able to look back at what I visited and what I have seen there.
Sometimes, IDers provide links with additional information for the species they IDed. I think it’s a nice sentiment, but those are not generally useful. I am only ever going to ID an observation myself, if I know all possibilities of what it could be and am able to choose between them - definitely not just because I know one possibility that looks like it fits. So for birds, I typically have an exhaustive field guide for the area I visited and will go based on it; for mammals, I will typically just know what is possible (because that’s now my favorite group), or I know outright that I can’t really tell it (often for bats or rodents), for herps, I try to find a checklist and field marks, or leave it to genus if the info is not easy to find for a given area. But for insects in general for example, I would have to own hundreds of field guides – there is simply so many species. So if it’s not a butterfly or dragonfly in Europe (for which there are exhaustive online resources), it’s gonna get a CV genus, or a very general ID. I think this is far better than trying to do an uninformed research, choosing a species, while being ignorant to the fact that there are 20 other less common species that are too similar for me to differentiate.
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Lyme and other tick diseases are not joke. They will literally destroy your life. I have lived with it for at least 30 years and I lost my aerospace job because of it. Now I daily wonder if I am dying. And, given my experience, the medical industry will not help you.
Yes, here where I live on the east side of California’s Sacramento valley I have come across no ticks in two years while walking frequently in fields and woods. However, if one travels just a few miles to the mountains to the east and west the story is different. Be careful because many are bitten and never know it until, after many frustrating years, they are diagnosed when it is too late.
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I have read or been told that a tick needs to stay attached for more than 24 hours to transmit Lyme disease. If this is true, then it suggests that @Thunderhead 's final precaution, viz., “On coming inside: inspect all clothes.undress in an area where you can unlayer carefully. Inspect yourself. Everywhere!” would be more important than all the rest.
And, putting this into the context of the main topic of this thread: it helps to know something of tick identification. When I worked for the Contra Costa Mosquito and Vector Control District, I would often hear my supervisor on the phone with someone who had sent in a specimen – telling them that it was a dog tick, which is not a species associated with Lyme disease. In that part of California, at least, Lyme disease is more associated with winter rather than summer, because the species of ticks that transmit it go dormant in the dry season.
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I’ve found something that seems to contain the things where somebody disagreed with me, but I don’t understand how and why it works:
https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_identifications.html?user_id=ralfmuschall¤t=false
It contains the disagreements I need (hopefully all of them) and those where I later refined my own ID. What I don’t know is whether it only shows those where my initial ID was withdran (either actively or by refining it myself) - in that case the URL would be totally useless (it would show me the solved problems, not the unsolved ones).
As already said, I need something like this to be able to withdraw my wrong IDs quickly, and looking thru all my 5k IDs in case I might have missed a notification isn’t an option…
PS: The following gives no hits:
https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_identifications.html?user_id=ralfmuschall&disagreement=true
Adding “&own_observation=false” to the first URL reduces the stuff I have to look at.
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You’re exactly correct. It has been interesting watching the wildly divergent evolution of this thread though! Laziness to lyme disease, and also almost everything in between 
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I’ve added a short info about burst mode (formerly “sports mode”) there: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/good-cameras-for-nature-shots/1064/139
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