Doesn’t make sense to me to leave plants in “Unknown” rather than “Plantae.” Doesn’t make sense to you. However, certain highly productive plant identifiers in Africa strongly prefer that unidentified plants be left at “Unknown,” so that’s what I try to do. They’re doing a very good job with a huge pile of unidentified plants there, and should not be discouraged.
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I mean, yeah, regardless there’s no reason I need to touch anything in africa, I’ve got plenty of other stuff I could ID more granularly than broad unknown plant IDs
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OK, so maybe the problem is limited to situations when the observer assumed something was infected with something else (the MRCA of the two being “Life”) and someone else diagreed with the infection and put the host in the ID field.
It was maybe the other way around?
It is not That butterfly, so the second identifier said no, but it is Life.
That hard disagreement unhelpfully equals Life for the algorithm.
Exactly! I just find it interesting how different the customs are in different parts of the world. And there are certainly plenty of Unknown plants for me to work on elsewhere in the world.
Related question: is there a link somewhere that exlains what a placeholder is, how to use them and why (if yes) to avoid messing with obs having one? I went thru the Help and FAQ and didn’t find useful info.
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Not really a custom. Simple lack of botanists in the Rest of the World to move the plantae.
764 K Plantae waiting across the world.
Who is ever going to work thru those?
But only 557 K Unknowns.
I am still battling the CNC residue.
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In a nutshell: It can only be done with an army of volunteers. Sole qualification required: Find iNat fun ;)
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Or addicting. (Speaking only for myself, of course.)
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Good point! I have bookmarked that URL and promise to work on it (although maybe not till it’s winter here).
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Placeholders aren’t something that one should use on purpose. If you type in a name iNaturalist doesn’t recognize, that name is used as a “placeholder.” Many placeholders are misspellings. In a few cases, the placeholder is a recently published name. The placeholder functions as the name, but it doesn’t really count for any other purpose. If someone comes along and types in a name iNaturalist does know, the placeholder disappears. For that reason, most of us prefer to copy the placeholder and add it as a comment to our ID (“Placeholder: Daucuz carota”) That way if the placeholder was something more useful than a misspelling, it isn’t lost.
If I want to label an observation with an unpublished or recently published name that iNaturalist doesn’t know yet, I prefer to put it in a comment with my ID, with the name of the next higher taxonomic level or sometimes the species name that iNaturalist knows although that’s being split. I think that although one should avoid using placeholders, iNaturalist should still allow them because they’re useful to deal with accidents of data entry.
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There is another qualification required: know at least a few plants. Harder for global than for local observations (e.g. I recently learned that whilst our Chelidonium is a neophyte in the USA, there is also a very similar genus Stylophorum which seems not to occur over here).
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Thanks. So my recent decision to skip things with placeholders was OK. I hope I didn’t destroy too many before I knew this.
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I destroyed placeholders at first, too. Not much lost in most cases (I hope).
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I wonder if there is a way to get a list of obs metadata where one could see when the original “species guess” (I think that’s the placeholder’s term in some part of the metadata) differs from the first ID given on the obs? That subset probably has most of the “placeholder overlooked” mistakes.
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To try to put a dent in one region: “Coming soon” (lol), an Africa-based Unknown/Magnoliopsida id challenge where we might have African experts standing by to mentor all of us African plant noobs. I was intending to have it after the CNC, not before, but I’m still doing CNC so it might not be “after” for a while yet ;)
When’s the next Great Southern Bioblitz? I guess sometime before then is a better timeline.
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Me three - that is why I look out for them now.
Wish iNat had a dedicated field for placeholder - which was under the observer’s control to display or delete. Like notes or comments.
@lotteryd Great Southern Bioblitz
November 24th-27th 2023
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And that “eventually” is what motivates me to put a best-guess based on my admittedly inadequate field guide. Maybe it isn’t really a yellow blusher, but that’s what I think it is until it “eventually” gets seen by someone who knows. That could be a few years, at the rate fungi go.
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Other question: is there a way to filter my own IDs in order to see only those where someone has added informations? I can click the bubble in the top right of the screen and see the top 10 or so; or I can go to my dashboard and click “IDs” but with no filter options, so I have to walk thru dozens of them. What I mainly want is to see if somebody disagrees, so I can reconsider and maybe withdraw my guess.
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You can view your own mavericks pretty easily:
https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?user_id=XXXX&category=maverick
just replace the XXXX in the link above with your iNat username. That’s not all disagreements with you, but a fair amount of high weight ones.