I agree with the proposed removal of the agree button. I’ve had people thank me in a comment but not agree with my ID, and I’m fine with that!
@IAmScout If you come across an observation that you know is right to family or genus, but you don’t agree with species for example, just add an ID for the genus and when the prompt for (and I’m paraphrasing) “I agree with genus but it’s not this species” or “I agree with genus and I don’t know if it’s this species” pops up, just go for the first option. If it’s your observation and you initially took it to genus and want to disagree with proposed species, I think if you repeat your ID the prompt should appear?
If you want clarification, the best thing to do is ask. Tag the person like I just tagged you. I don’t take the time to explain every identification that I make unless it’s disagreeing with several others, but I’m always happy to clarify my IDs, and I even have that mentioned on my profile so people know they are welcome to tag me!
which agree button are people referring to? The one on the observation (not taxon) page? On the ID help page? I think removing the option to agree would really slow down ID for thsoe of us who do it properly which i think is still the bulk of IDs.
I didn’t even know there was one on the taxon page (I checked a taxon page and still don’t see it).
I was referring to the one on the observation page. I think when new users look at someone’s suggestion on their observation page and the tab next to it says “Agree,” they tend to think they should agree even if they don’t know. With “Agree” as the only tab, it looks like the choice is between agreeing and ignoring somebody’s suggestion.
sorry, by taxon page i meant observation page. I use that a lot and not frivolously… if it were removed it would result in me doing less IDs. Maybe adding a ‘suggest another ID’ button near the agree button would be nice though.
clicking agree, or typing in 3 + 3 letters and selecting from a list. Not really arduous, I see it as putting in a much needed “are you sure you want to agree” aspect.
But yes, it would affect those that can ID en-mass effectively
Users will just change their behaviour accordingly, so it won’t make much difference. It will also put most places in the world at a disadvantage relative to N. America and Western Europe. N.Z., for example, has a pop. of <5 million. Finding 3 experts to agree with an observation on iNat for many taxa would be very difficult. I’m not seeing a significant problem with RG misidentifications from N.Z., so the only effect would be to significantly reduce our contribution of RG obs!
I think the agree button that is potentially problematic is the agree button on the identify page thumbnails.
While some plants, given a good photo, can be identified from the thumbnail, many plants require opening the modal dialog box and viewing the original images to make a determination. I do not know the impact of removing the Agree button on the thumbnails on high volume identifiers. I would support the following change which shifts the psychology from fulfilling a desire to be agreeable to making a judgement on the identification:
This seems to be a perennial topic that comes up again and again and again. @bouteloua had a nice poll in that first link, where she also said that the “agree” button on the ID modal is likely to stay due to staff preference.
Yeah if it were removed from the observation page I’d do less IDs and I doubt it would solve the problem. I’m ok with it being removed from those thumbnails
Maybe a middle ground is to only show that Agree button if account has more than 500 IDs made (or maybe 50). That way power IDers wouldn’t be hindered, and it gives a chance for new users to get to grips with things first before they get access to the Agree button…
I think so. As previously mentioned, the agree button is almost treated like a “Like” or a “thank you” for the id, and it also makes the obs RG which kinda reinforces the “goodness of agreeing, even if you don’t have a clue yourself”
10% of IDs incorrect is 10%, regardless of how large the dataset is. Just using more data won’t help if that additional data has the same error rate. You will just end up with 10,000 wrong IDs in your data instead of 100.
Maybe, though, crucially, misidentifications can be corrected. This is probably the only real solution. Also, your statistical evaluation may be misleading. If I have 10 data points, 9 of which agree plus 1 outlier, vs. 100000 points, 90000 of which agree, I’d say that 90000 agreements cannot be overturned by 10% outliers, but 9 agreements could be overturned by 10% outliers.
I think that the tendency for users to agree with identifications without independently verifying them (this topic and many others) and the tendency for users to choose the top computer vision suggestion without independently verifying it (this topic and many others) results in a feedback loop that produces many research grade observations of obscure, difficult (or impossible) to identify species that do not have identifiers specifically monitoring them for issues like this to pull the observation back to a higher level. I’ve come across this situation in multiple species, and because they are into the computer vision suggestions the problem never really goes away with these species.
The plans to have the computer vision work with taxa levels other than just species should help with the computer vision problem, but I think something else needs to be done in addition to help with the “automatic agreement” problem.
I think it is too easy to Agree with and ‘expert’ when you have little knowledge. After all, who would disagree with the expert? When I provide an id for someone who I can tell has no clue, I hate it when they agree immediately and send it to research grade (even when I am sure).
Suggestion. Have a Thank you button in addition to the Agree on the observation page. If you made the observation, disable the agree button, but allow an identification to be made.
I’m not sure population size is the best predictor of how likely something is to achieve research grade status, there is no evidence to suggest that smaller areas get less rates of successful ID’s. I’d think relative level of engagement within the population is going to better track this.
I took a look at the ‘success’ rate of getting verifiable records to research grade for 11 significant contributing nations to the site. New Zealand actually ranks high using this metric.
What I got (sorry I wont try to remember the html to build a table)
Russia - 82% of possible records have achieved Research Grade
The following post has now been double flagged as “off-topic”, which it clearly IS NOT! If anyone fails too see the relevance of it to the topic, then they can either ignore it or reply to it asking me to explain its relevance.
