i found out through one observation that a user has been voting bird bones as “Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved? No, it’s as good as it can be” to turn them from “needs id” to “casual” even if the bones could still potentially be improved if someone has the knowledge.
and i feel like this is not an appropriate data quality assessment, but would like to see other people’s input. i do like seeing discussions of inat etiquette on here and am not sure whether i would be correct to ask the user to refrain from what they are doing.
Im kind of torn here. While i agree in this case it likely could go better than birds, for the DQA section to be meaningful, it needs to be acceptable for people to use to honestly express their opinion on the evidence. Other folks are equally able to express a differing view.
It is important to remember a vote there is solely the assessment of that voter, not the official view of the site. So long as it is not maliciously done, folks should be able to use it to reflect their assessment.
It is unfortunate no notifications are sent when the status is changed by a vote. For example only by accident did I discover a user had voted the date was inaccurate on several of my records because I remove the time of day and only leave the date.
I also wish there was a way to filter searching for casual records to separate those there due to dqa votes versus missing data etc.
The observation now says “Needs ID”, not “Casual” - and I see votes for “Yes” the taxon can be improved - so it looks like those overrode the one who said “No.”
in any event, it would be great to be able to search for ones own observations where data quality assessments were tagged. it’s possible to filter for ‘casual and with media’ but that includes observations without location or time. But a brief peek turned up this observation where someone marked the location wrong in error. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2361146
My understanding was that being alerted to ppl changing DQA on an obs is in the pipeline to come with the upgraded notification system. But where this was discussed I can’t remember, would have to do a trawl.
Conversely, I would like to search for the times where I flagged something of someone else’s in a given way. Just in case I made a mistake or misclick, revised my thinking about an issue, or the observer fixed something that I had marked as problematic, it would be good to go review some occasionally.
this will be excellent. It would be nice to find old ones too though. I wanted to check if that person tagged any of mine ans wrong time for not including the exact time, too. ( as @bouteloua noted there are a lot of reasons not to do so and in terms of data quality it has little bearing on anything).
The unintended consequence of getting five votes for “Yes” is that now, even if the observation gets identified to species by multiple people, it will be stuck at Needs ID. It only needs one or two of those votes to remain in Needs ID but be easily converted later to Research Grade.