As a person who targets getting new plant species for his state, I can’t disagree with anything you’ve said.
I love this idea! I’d drop it down to first within a 500 mile radius rather than 1000 though.
One of the things I like about this idea is that it would encourage people to look for obscure species to record, or get into learning difficult taxa. The effect of that I think would be much more valuable than the detriment of a few gamifiers doing dodgy IDs (You’d probably have to get quite into iNat before you noticed these things anyway, and therefore probably not so irresponsible).
They might take up a bit of space unless they were done as little badges/rosettes of different colours next to the RG banner (hover over to get the explanation). I quite like the idea of having all of the above: ‘First uploaded observation’, ‘first identified observation’, and ‘oldest observation’. All of them should be applicable only to research grade obsevration, and should be redeployed if the truth changes.
In short, I like this idea. Whether the programmers like it… I will leave to them!
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Out of votes, but supporting!
Surely the solution to confirmation bias with this idea is a simple one? For any observation flagged with the ‘iNat first’ label, an algorithm can be used to push such observations to the top of the ‘Needs ID’ pile with obs recurring at the top of this log indefinitely until such time as they have atleast 2 ID’s from 2 different accounts for the same species
How does an observation become flagged with the INat first label?
Probably it’ll be when this taxon will be first added (or if first one was withdrawn/deleted) to observation and there’s no disagreement with previous ids.
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I should’ve said “Hypothetically speaking”, sorry. This feature is obviously not implemented already and judging on what other matters the iNat team has to attend to, may not be for quite some time still
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I remember reading about this some time ago but stumbled across it again recently. I noticed that there are 1042 observations “iNatFirst” (no space) and 858 “iNat first” (with a space). :(
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There’s another issue you didn’t mention. You mentioned first posted observation and first identified observation, but there’s a third possibility. If I take a picture with an observation date that comes before yours but post it after, which of these takes priority? I could easily go back through old slides and find an old picture from three decades ago, post it decades later and be the first observation…just not the first posting of an observation.
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Which also carries the risk of an unscrupulous person falsifying the date, since those archival slides have no metadata.
I woudl support a tag for “possibly outside known range” for observations far from other observation, this tag could warn of possible errors and new discoveries, without incentivizing bad IDs
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we already have data quality votes such as “Date is accurate” to turn the observations to casual