https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/131683-500-000-identifiers-and-counting
I see that some forum members have already posted comments to today’s blog post, but I’m sure there are others who will find this interesting.
As an amateur naturalist, I’ve heard of the h-index without having any understanding of its meaning or use. The blog post uses this to measure observations and identifications on iNaturalist. I’m going to have to think about that for a while.
Well, it’s treating the community as a singular thing whereas h-index as used in journal publishing is scored for each person individually.
Thanks for starting this topic. The blog does not show up if your language setting is not English.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/homepage-in-other-languages-does-not-show-newsitems/60895/4
The h-index comparison would be more reassuring if it took just one identifier ID to move an observation to research grade, but that only happens when the observer correctly identifies their own observation to species.
I giggled (or grinned?) a bit as i stumbled upon the analogy to the (contentious) h-index, refered to as a metric for “scholarly productivity”. Makes me miss the 1990s academia…
This was my first thought as well - The graphs look better than I expected, but they give me a very different answer than Scott got to the question of whether the identifier community can keep up.
No - I’m pretty sure the graph says “no” to that, though perhaps it says “no” quieter than looking at the length of the identification queues through the last couple of years do.
I have recently seen people in social media coming back to iNat after some years and asking why is the site “dead” now (in that they used to get IDs and now they don’t), and many, many users that didn’t even know they were able to make IDs for others, as the mobile apps do not have any indication of it or encouragement to do it.
Adamwargon and @zygy said something very important there - The platform seems to take the ever-increasing effort of the IDers for granted, while largely ignoring our requests for tools and measures to reduce the overload.
I do keep trying to teach everyone how to ID and help people lose the fear to do it, but the post left me a bit of an unadressed elephant taste.
Marsel, thank you for mentioning this. I think you have mentioned it before, but I always forget! It’s good to hear it again.