I know how you feel. I think observers often intend to express that they trust and value the IDer’s expertise, but I would feel more valued if observers did not agree to IDs they can’t confirm.
I don’t have any consistent way of responding. If it’s a common species that is relatively uncomplicated for someone with a bit of knowledge to ID, I generally will just let it be.
If it is an ID that was particularly difficult and I put a fair amount of research into it, I might leave a comment pointing the observer to the FAQ on “when should I agree to an ID”. However, I have seldom found this to have any effect on the behavior of observers. So…
If I am reasonably sure of the ID and it is something that, in my experience, other local specialists in that taxon are likely to review anyway, I may not do anything further.
If I am not confident about the ID (because it is a new taxon for me or the perspective is difficult or whatever), I might tag an IDer I trust for additional confirmation.
In a few cases I have indeed quietly withdrawn my ID make the observation “needs ID” instead of RG, usually because I either didn’t have the energy to get into a discussion with the observer or because the taxon was at the edge of my expertise to start with.
What I find most difficult are cases where there is an existing disagreement for an observation that turns out to be something fairly rare or notable – the only way to get the observation listed under that taxon is to add an agree that will result in the observation becoming RG. Here, too, I will tag users or encourage the person who provided the wrong ID to reconsider, but sometimes there aren’t a lot of other options than to agree with an ID that I think is probably correct but would not otherwise feel certain enough to confirm.
You could also leave your active ID and use the DQA for ‘can be improved’ to hold it back from RG.
Yes, that is an option, but in my experience clicking “ID can be improved” typically causes more problems than it solves, because IDers rarely notice that it has been checked and it is easy for the person checking the box to forget that they have done so and that they need to remove their vote once additional IDs have been provided (particularly if several months have passed before these IDs arrive). I therefore generally only use it to counter a premature “ID cannot be improved” vote.
But they notice that the observation remains at “Needs ID” despite having enough IDs to make Research Grade. If they were aware of how that works, that would trigger them to look for that DQA box. So the question is how can we improve awareness?
Not necessarily; I suspect that in many cases IDers may not notice that their ID did not have the expected effect and the observation has not become RG – and once they have ID’d the observation, it is marked as “reviewed” for them and thus disappears from their “needs ID” queue.
Sometimes IDers move on to the next observation without waiting to see the result of their ID, which means (for example) that they do not notice if they accidentally selected a completely wrong ID from the menu. I have seen such cases plenty of times. And it is even easier to overlook the little banner above the photo not turning green than it is to overlook the community ID changing to something unexpected.
And as other discussions have shown, some percentage of IDers have a workflow in which they do not distinguish between RG and Needs ID, so they may not be paying much attention to the banner in the first place. But of course it still affects the observer and other IDers if an observation is perpetually left at Needs ID.
I have seen observations that end up with 7 or 8 IDs before someone notices that the “ID can be improved” box is checked and countervotes it, so clearly not all IDers investigate such cases.
As someone who spends much more time finding things in the field and identifying them than identifying what others find, I find the intellectual distance between ‘observers’ and identifiers to be remarkable. I spend a great deal of time post-field looking through keys, guides, google and iNaturalist photos to identify a species. I greatly enjoy finding things I’ve never seen or keying out a species in a family I’ve never photographed before. But there seems to be a consistent thread that Observers don’t know what they are doing. I think it is worth noting that there have to be many many more people like me who diligently work through field photos to identify rare species. Maybe recognizing that “observers” can differ just like identifiers would be a good thing to think about. Some good, some bad, some exceptional. And, FWIW, the term Observer really minimizes people who find things in the field, almost implying that they’re not capable of identifying what they see. JMO and one of the reasons why I sometimes feel a bit bothered when I read the forum.
Observers are highly variable! Some like you are being really diligent about what you photo and how you identify it! You bring a lot more value to your observations than the word “observer” expresses, a lot more than the average observer brings.
The problem is, “observers” includes 7th graders posting on iNaturalist because their teacher said to, with no clue what they’re doing. “Observers” also include every variation in skill at photographing, skill at identifying, and interest. We do complain about what observers do because this forum is a place to vent our frustrations and sometimes find ways to improve the observations. We know that “observers” is a category that includes even ourselves. We identifiers/observers mostly do a pretty good job of it – we should, since we get a lot of practice with what works and what doesn’t as far as photos go.
When we say negative things about “observers” we mentally modify the terms to mean “most observers” or “some observers” or “these observers I just dealt with who really frustrated me.” You can’t know hear that modification, of course. It’s understandable that you feel insulted. We’re really aiming our statements at people who are behaving differently from you, though they – we – are all observers.
I’m sorry you have been hurt. I’d like to say we’ll stop this, but I think we won’t. “Observers” is such a handy word. Frustrating.
It is useful to be able to distinguish between different roles on iNaturalist – many people are of course both observers and identifiers. But the functions and responsibilities are a bit different when one is acting as an observer and when one is acting as an identifier of other people’s observations, and we need a way to talk about this.
I think the issue is not so much making this distinction, as reifying these categories and turning them into broad generalizations (all observers, all identifiers).
It’s also important to be aware that these roles do not correspond directly with specialized expertise (observers may have specialized knowledge about what they observe or some portion thereof; IDers include people who provide broad sorting to get observations seen by specialists).
In the forum, I see about as much annoyance directed at identifers as at observers. Either are capable of behaviors that tend to hinder progress towards the collective goals of iNat (i.e. ensuring that observations have complete, accurate data and are ID’d correctly). In some cases these behaviors overlap: not withdrawing wrong IDs because one has not kept up with one’s notifications is a problem regardless of whether the person entered that ID on their own observation or someone else’s.
It is also very possible that users may behave differently in their roles as observers and IDers. For example, I have seen specialist IDers uncritically agree to IDs on their own observations of taxa outside their area of expertise. It is relevant to refer to them as observers when criticizing this behavior, because it has nothing to do with their activities as IDers. (Though I admit I find this practice particularly baffling when it is coming from people who ought to know firsthand why it is a problem.)
The concern that motivated this thread was actually not about observer behavior, but about identifier behavior – namely, the perception that some users add lots of IDs to get on the top of the leaderboards even though they lack expertise, and that this is unfair to the users who actually have worked hard to gain that expertise. I will note that I have not seen this to be a widespread problem; rather, some people use the leaderboards uncritically without considering what the numbers mean.
that is an example of why I look for the problem children. Kingdom Disagreement, Pre-Maverick, Placeholder text ignored, still sitting in Needs ID with a string of IDs 10 years later, ID is in a comment, etc.
Not in iNat itself, but if you’re talking about some really rare species that has really few observations or none at all, the pictures posted in iNat observations that get to RG often end up in this same species page in GBIF. Only the observer’s username will appear in GBIF for posting the pictures and not the username of the person who identified it too
That is what I really wanted to say but couldn’t express it so clearly as you did here.
Thanks so much for sharing that perspective!