In Defense of the Thousand Confirming Identifications

General
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There are some who say: why provide the sixth, tenth, thirty-fifth confirming identification on an observation; why waste your time? Others provide the standard apologies for the practice: we are learning, we are correcting mistakes; we’re there, so we might as well. I agree with the apologists, but my defense also rests on different grounds.

I say - may we not bask in the glorious luxury of time-wasting? May we not spend our hours marveling at observations and duly marking our presence while running on the treadmill, lying in bed, or sitting on the toilet? May we not find simple joy in casting our vote, no matter how rudimentary or common? Others watch television, play video games, or you know, whittle or something. Is our lower-effort identification vice really so opprobrious?

So change your notification settings if you must; we will not judge. Just keep the sweet, sweet observations coming, as we will need them after working through the last decade of observations. Our mental illness and vain glory cost you so little!

And are our late-arriving identifications on this democratic, egalitarian platform really less valuable than those preceding? Centuries from now, Earth destroyed, iNaturalist will live on, a memory of times past. And from a cave deep within the recesses of the Moon, a young child will cast the thousandth vote on an observation.

Across the generations, I will stand in solidarity: that was a Blue Jay.

/////

(Note: I’m not really calling anybody out; I absolutely respect a lot of the folks in the “you’re wasting your time” camp! Happy iNatting, everybody!)

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tearing up… that was a blue jay <3

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I believe we all should double check each other… if it takes 5-10-100 :100: confirming IDs on a B.impatiens. Then why not jump on in, the ice has melted and the waters are looking good for a swim.

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The first time I visited the states, I was at a bus stop and I saw this really awesome overtly blue bird. I thought it was pretty cool, I asked another person at the bus stop if they knew what it was. They looked at me like I was an idiot and said “Its a blue jay”. I was like…oh, thanks.

After that I learned it was pretty common, and several sports teams are even named after it. But, it was just not really something I had been exposed to before that.

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Can I change then my notifications settings so that I don’t get notification about 35th confirmation it’s a blue jay but will get notification when the 36th ID is something different? Honest question, I just didn’t find that

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Sure can! (1) you’ll need to be on the website (not the app), (2) go to your avatar in the upper-right of the page, (3) go to account settings, (4) go to notifications, and (5) toggle “confirming ID’s” off.

It’s a much calmer experience, if you’re into that sort of thing. :slightly_smiling_face:

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No matter what you do, how many times you do it, where you do it from, how much time you have to do it, there will always be someone who would rather waste their time complaining about it instead of doing something constructive and contributing to the evolution of our species. But, that is their right, even if we don’t think it is right.

For the record, living here in the UK and not getting out much, I’ve never even seen a Blue Jay, let alone left an ID on one…

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If my ID was the first, confirmation is a valuable info for me, I don’t want to lose that :(

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as someone who lives in a relatively quiet area for inat I cant even fathom getting more than 3 IDs on something

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I had a quick look (to add a third for you) - but mostly birds - any birders on this thread ??

African and Asian elephants reaching across the ocean. https://eefalsebay.blogspot.com/2014/04/spekboom-at-Addo-Portulacaria-afra.html

And if it makes the rest of you happy - I will tick A instead of R in future.

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Haha - that tense change was the last edit I made before posting - I knew killing them off was the right thing to do for dramatic effect!

This is funny, too! I spent a couple of minutes thinking about what species to single out - I wanted something universally known, loved (at least by some), and easy to identify. Couldn’t use dandelions, as all sorts of dummies are starting topics about them. Before posting this, I actually looked to see if Blue Jays were found outside North America. But I couldn’t think of a better candidate, so I gave up - please forgive me! :joy:

It would be good if there were some more nuanced notification options…

Aw, shucks, I’m always happy just hearing what you have to say! :slightly_smiling_face: Also, these are the things I love about iNaturalist - I didn’t plan on reviewing the range of Blue Jays or whether I can ID some South Korean species today, but here we are!

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Ignoring the mallard, which seems to have enough hybrids to confuse. I would guess the house sparrow is the most wide spread bird. But not sure if any of those are getting super id’ed, since they probably arent as charismatic as jays.

I feel like the obs I have done which are the most likely to get over 10 ids are snakes. But since I only see snakes when overseas, I dont have too many of those.

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They are beautiful, charismatic and intelligent, and deservedly attract many admirers (and IDers).

Just for fun, you should ID one, even if there are already a thousand confirmations. They are really easy to ID, even if you haven’t seen one, so there’s little risk of contributing a false ID. Then you’d have something new for your IDer “life list” (if there is such a thing.)

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One note of caution: doing this makes it next to impossible to correct misidentifications. It often takes years and many experts to overturn an observation that gets more than 4 confirming IDs. If a misidentified observation has 10 confirming IDs, it’s virtually impossible to get it to be RG at the correct species, especially if the species is uncommon. In cases where there are already 4 or more confirming IDs, pressing “R” is usually more appropriate than pressing “A.” Not to say I’ve never done it.

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Beautiful! I had no idea. I had previously asked if we could set it to only show comments, and that was a no. This helps a lot as far as them not getting lost.

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Only recently and the birds always get identified within a few weeks. Everything else on the other hand :sweat_smile::sweat_smile::sweat_smile:

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I just hate all this complaining about complaining… ;-)

…reminds me of one of my favorite Brad Paisley songs, “Time Well Wasted”.

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This is definitely a potential issue to keep in mind - especially in certain taxa. I absolutely don’t advocate blindly hitting the “agree” button without being justifiably, independently confident in your ID. It’s fun and easy when you agree with an identification - but also serious business!

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You can be confident in the ID, even right in some sense, and still contribute to this issue: for example, there are a lot of mistletoes in California with tons of agreeing IDs that are correct under the Jepson treatment of the family but do not match the taxonomy on iNat. Most of these observations will never get to RG under the species name they would be IDed as in any other state.

Presumably, there are instances where a cryptic species is discovered, and something that up until that point could only be called species X should now fall under species Y—but 5 agreeing IDs on species X, a couple by now-inactive users who are not likely to change their IDs, mean the observation could be stuck in limbo for years.

Not that we should necessarily withhold agreeing IDs for these reasons, but I do think it’s worth thinking critically about. I treat every ID as something that I’m responsible for potentially returning to in the future, and that does sometimes shorten the leash.

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I’ve encountered the scenario in your second paragraph a few times when a subspecies that was confirmed by multiple people has been promoted to a new species but not everyone who added an identification has changed their ID to reflect the ‘new’ taxonomy. And it hasn’t always been due to the users becoming inactive.

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