I think it’s fine to politely tag those who didn’t change their IDs and ask them to take a look. If you have the energy, you might want explain that at any time iNat only has a single taxonomy, so this isn’t really about “Which name do you prefer?” and more about “Which is the correct identification choice within iNat’s taxonomy?” Personally, I have the setting enabled to “Automatically update my content for taxon changes”, which avoids the issue entirely.
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I’ve been doing my best to help with Korean spider and insect identifications! 
There are definitely times when I’ve tagged the users who didn’t change their IDs to ask if they would reconsider. In some cases that’s helped while in others it hasn’t – possibly because the user missed the tag, they want to wait for a local authority to implement the changes as well, or they plan to look into it themselves and maybe just never get around to it.
I tend to be reluctant to tag the same user more than once on the same observation but if enough time has passed it may be worth asking again.
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I agree. If I happen to come across the observation maybe six months later and it seems that the user is still active on iNat, I may tag them again. I’ve had a few cases where users responded to a third, friendly tag maybe three years after the first couple were missed. It’s almost always that people don’t see these things or forget to change their IDs.
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I’ve changed my tune on this since joining iNat. Early days, I was firmly in the “What possible use could there be for repeating IDs on RG observations” camp. After seeing the consequences of IDers quitting iNat and their identifications evaporating I now make confirming IDs if I’m sure of them and there aren’t already confirming IDs in place. If there’s a really interesting or cool observation that already has confirming IDs, I might fave it but probably won’t ID it.
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Had this happen for an observation of mine, a burst of IDs on a random Blue Heron observation of mine. It was splendid! I was so curious as to what was the sudden attention, turns out it was included in an experiment, who would have known! I’ve never found any issue with confirming IDs, always a wonderful feeling to know someone took the time to check out the observation!
For the record, it was this observation!: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/198353442
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Here, Here. Whole heartedly agree!
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OK. I don’t get it. What evidence do you have that numerous people just blindly agree?
There was a message I received about an experiment, I was directed to some random observations to make an id, because maybe I have unknowingly been one of the top identifiers in some species. When you see an observation with many identifiers, it could be because iNat directed some identifiers there.
I noticed my snake observations often gets more than 5 identifiers typically. They like snakes. Adding a confirming id prevents it from changing state.
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Reminds me of Gerald (warning: this observation has many comments and IDs and can slow and crash your browser)… but more than two confirming IDs is great for redundancy and reduces issues like this: How did about 50 species disappear from our project without notice?.
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I wonder if there is another, quite simple reason for many confirming IDs. The button “agree” is much closer to “next observation” than the button “mark as read”… It is much faster to agree for the 5th time than to not ID.
Not if you save “Mark as reviewed” for the end of the page.
The “Identify” tab has 30 observations per page.
“Agree” on each + “Next Observation” on each = 60 clicks
“Mark as reviewed” on each + “Next observation” on each = 60 clicks
“Next observation” on each + “Mark all as reviewed” in the popup = 31 clicks.
If there are some that you can improve, each of those adds a click, but it’s still fewer than 60 clicks unless you can improve all 30.
Why would you click “mark as reviewed” on each separately when you can do it much more quickly as a batch at the end?
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I would guess that the proximity of the Agree button may play a role for some identifiers, but different people have different workflows. Most “power” IDers will likely be relying on keyboard shortcuts (or gamepads or something else exotic and optimized) and not mouse actions which will eliminate screen proximity as a factor in their workflow.
That said, the “Mark all as reviewed” button only really works in cases where you want to never see any of the observations on a given page again in IDing. Oftentimes when IDing RG observation I really have three categories:
- Agree (most used)
- Reviewed (if I can only confirm to a higher level and don’t want to type that in; low value action and takes a lot of time)
- Neither Reviewed or Agreed (something interesting is happening here that I want to look at in more detail later)
So I generally use the Reviewed (“R”) shortcut (infrequently) on individual observations (which hardly adds any time for me) as opposed to Marking All as Reviewed for the page to give myself the option for that third category (the interesting ones that need a closer look).
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for those I Follow this obs (if specialists are discussing the ID I want to see where it goes to) - then I can Mark All as Reviewed.
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I see a lot of people using the reviewed button liberally, but I think I’m just the opposite. With the exception of things where the photo is simply too blurry or something where I think I may never get a good ID from it, I often just skip things I cannot ID, in hopes that sometime in the future it may come around again when I’ve learned more and maybe I can help nudge it then.
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The problem with people piling on with IDs is that our knowledge of biology is very dynamic and perpetually changing. One year a particular organism may be called X, the next year it may be discovered to actually be two organisms- X and Y. The more confirming IDs there are, the greater the difficulty is to correct them after taxonomies change or after organisms evolve, hybridize, or do all the other weird things organisms do. Ideally, every IDer would then go back and change their ID’s… but realistically, only a very tiny fraction of them would. Even assuming the change happened within their lifetimes, and they’re still alive, they may simply not have time, they may not be active on iNat anymore, etc.
For a lot of organisms, piling on with confirming ID’s basically ensures that the data will never be useful for anything if the taxonomy changes in certain ways. There will simply not be enough IDers willing to spend the hours and hours of time going through tens of thousands of observations with loads of now incorrect IDs. So piling on is not only not particularly useful, it is can absolutely be harmful if what we think we know about biology or taxonomy changes…
In situations of most taxonomic changes on iNat, people’s ID that are affected by taxonomic changes will either be changed to a new taxon or bumped back to a higher taxon. Multiple confirming IDs can potentially cause issues where users need to update IDs manually but this is a small proportion of cases.
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