Like others have said it can be very dependent on the organisms at hand. I deal mainly with ants from Western Europe (Spain mostly) in both IDing and observing, and I have found that many observations of some species barely get another ID aside from mine even if I include all the details in the images needed to ID them. If more than 2 IDs were required many of these would become “needs id” again due to the lack of IDers specialised in both a taxon and location.
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Your talking about Western Europe! Just imagine how the situation is in countries that have even less users, and less coverage by iNat… see for example the countries listed in this project:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/low-growth-countries-and-territories
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I think it just comes down to understanding what the “research grade” designation means. It doesn’t by any means indicate that an ID is “confirmed”, as in “definitely right”. It just means “there’s some agreement about this ID in the community”. Even if 95% of RG observations are “right”, as suggested in the link given above, that still means 1 in 20 is potentially/definitely wrong. I’ve got about 10k RG observations, so assuming I’m a representative sample of iNat, I’ve probably got around 500 ID mistakes among my so-called “confirmed” IDs! (probably all my poor attempts at Carex IDs, help me @sedgequeen lol) It’s semantics I guess, but I think the term “confirmed” gets thrown around too casually in conversations about IDs in general. I see it on moths all the time. (“ID confirmed by BAMONA”, “ID confirmed on BugGuide”, “ID confirmed for the Season Summary”…) And of course plenty of those IDs turn out to be right, and plenty of others are wrong. I would never infer from “someone else online told me I’m right” that “my ID was confirmed”. It just means my ID was corroborated, not absolutely verified. I think that similarly, the Research Grade system on iNat is perfectly fine, but that the unrealistic expectation of users that “Research Grade” should mean something akin to “Definitely Correct” is where the problem arises. Maybe re-naming “Research Grade” to “More-than-likely-right-but-don’t-let-it-go-to-your-head-cause-taxonomy-is-hard Grade” would solve everything. ;)
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The part about taxonomy is hard made me laugh out loud!
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Just remember, though, that if it is still at “Needs ID” after collecting several identifications, somebody else can vote, “No, it’s as good as it can be.” Almost everything on iNaturalist, except for opting out, can be overruled by the community.
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I see many beginners using the ‘Agree’ button as “thankyou” and this sends many incorrect ids to Research Grade. It takes time away from the experts to correct these ids. Would be great to have a “Thank you” button
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(and then tethered to - No notifications, for ‘thank you’, please
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I don’t necessarily think that we should require three agreeing IDs before the observation is research grade (So many more IDs across the platform would be required when IDers have their hands full already!) but I am always happy to see more agreeing IDs on my observations because sometimes when people die, their family members shut down their iNat membership and their IDs are lost, potentially bumping observations out of research grade and back to needs ID.
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Or a better onboarding process, educating new users with a message displayed the first few times, “This button is not a way to show your appreciation! Only agree if you feel confident identifying this observation as < Genus species >”.
(beating a dead horse…)
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