I will usually leave a comment if there is a specific characteristic I can point to that is distinguishes the wrong and right species. This is usually easy if the observer has chosen a species that is in the right genus. I use text shortcuts for common phrases so it’s not even very slow. But it’s hard for me to say anything helpful when the original ID is completely random. It would be like describing the whole species out of a key. If someone had a well though out reason to believe their original ID was correct, I’d try to explain my reasoning though.
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I only rarely state the explanation behind my disagreements, for the reasons said above. But I will occasionally write an explanation, because even if the original observer doesn’t respond to them, I know there are a few other people that read my comments. I also find it helpful when identifying organisms to look at what other people have wrote. So I figure that even if I don’t explain every time, I may still help people learn if I explain once in a while.
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I’ve greedily read your comments and learned from them @someplant. You are modest in your post, but my anecdotal impression is that - cumulatively, across a body of work - you are generous with your time and knowledge and you do quite a bit of explanatory commenting. I take your point about follow on reading. It’s interesting to consider that it is hard to know how much of a ripple effect across users even one particular clarifying comment might have. I guess most of us tend to forget a particular comment very quickly after we’ve moved on and written additional comments. And to do so is only practical. But how much value can an instructive comment appreciate days, years after it is written? It’s useful to frame comments as more or less singular interactions, as mostly done here, but it’s worth considering that some of these comments might have substantial accrued value that we don’t/can’t measure reliably. Granted, not every comment is going to change lives and maybe I’m being a little breathless, pollyanna-ish. But I think this is probably a thing.
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One way to get around that is to use “canned” explanations. I have a draft email that contains copies of frequently used explanations. I used to keep it open in another tab while doing identifications, and copy explanations as needed (with or without impromptu modifications). But even that requires a bit of extra time/effort. Observers frequently show no sign of having read these comments and neither do folks adding subsequent IDs, so I don’t do this as much as I used to.
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Pareto principle. 1 writes the comment. 9 more engage with that obs. 90 more are ‘silent’ readers. The ripple effect is real!
For the taxon specialists https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/use-a-text-expander-browser-extension-to-quickly-enter-frequently-used-text/42842
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There’s a difference between stating your own reasoning on the one hand, and helping someone else understand something on the other. It’s impossible to anticipate everything that other people might not know, so I feel it’s usually more productive to wait for someone to ask for clarification than to leave a generic comment.
There are many different ways to explain something, and I often find it’s necessary to carefully tailor my response to suit the person I’m trying to help. This can sometimes be quite challenging if I’ve never gone through the process of reducing my own reasoning to its simplest terms (a.k.a. talking to the duck). Sometimes the most naive questions can be the most difficult to answer.
Every conversation is a potential learning opportunity for me as well as the person I am trying to help. Accumulating knowledge doesn’t automatically qualify anyone to be a good teacher.
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I occasionally add reasoning for a disagreement up front, especially if it is apparent that previous identifiers put work into their ID, but mostly I don’t as it takes a lot of extra time away from other iNat tasks. If someone wants to know why, they can ask, but I think it is important for people to actually try looking things up for themselves as they may learn a lot more that way.They may not find an answer, but they will at least have the starting point of knowing that they should look up what the differences between two taxa are and the experience of trying to figure it out. I’m happy to help but, if they aren’t willing to put in a little extra effort, why should I?
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I think a good way is just to link a reference and add a note;
I should humbly warn you that you cannot change other’s attitude; many identifiers, including me, make many many ids and honestly it is just going to slow our identifications if we start explaining one very disagreement, especially where CVM is what made the id.
The best choice is that if someone comes up and contradicts your id and you cannot understand why, the you can ask them why they made the id; that can help you. generally an identifier would not hesitate to answer the questions you ask; you can also ask them for guidance when you are very confused;
I have been working on a project ( https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/inat-speciesfile-interactive-keys-database-an-initiative-to-make-taxonomy-more-understandable ). If you join all projects (including those under it) and send me a message requesting manager status then you can make some interactive keys to help others understand how rot differentiate various species.
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I’m of two minds here. I like to teach. I do feel an obligation to explain why I disagree. So I sometimes do explain. In fact, I have a long file of explanations I can copy-and-paste for issues I see frequently.
On the other hand, I try to move fast when identifying and explaining takes time. Furthermore, it often feels useless. So often the observer doesn’t even change his ID. In many cases, they’re long gone.
If you want to know, ask! Please ask! Discussing the issue with somebody who cares is rewarding to me and hopefully the other person. Remember, the responsibility for useful communication does not rest entirely with me.
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7 posts were split to a new topic: Pareto Principle / online participation
Well, let me justify your hope. I photograph galls on occasion, don’t know much about them, but am interested in learning more, and now have the Gallformers website bookmarked into my “Online Field Guides” folder. Thank you!
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I’ve done this before too, but I find it a hassle to keep track of them when I’m IDing genera with large numbers of species. I know it would only take like 10 more seconds per observation, but that really adds up when you’re IDing in mass or are just taking a short break to get a small dose of nature before moving onto the next thing.
The other problem with this is that it’s hard to write something general enough that it will apply well to every observation. When I set aside time to spend a couple hours identifying a taxon I’m learning, it’s very easy to create comments that apply to everything you’ve just seen. It’s much harder when it’s a once or twice per day kind of situation.
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Yes, it won’t work in every case. If you’re doing the same taxa regularly, and you’re trying to “teach” the pool of observers enough to (hopefully) reduce the number of corrections you’ll have to make down the road, it can be a worthwhile investment. Eventually, it might sink in.
But I agree, those few seconds on each observation can add up. As I said, I’m not adding those “canned” comments as much as I used to, because in many cases, they don’t appear to have done much good. You can often sense when it’s worth it to add them and when it probably isn’t.
Another approach could be to just make the corrections without comments, and if, after a few sessions, you think to yourself “ya know, I’ve been making that same bloody correction over and over again…”, it might be worthwhile to go back, find all the observations that you’ve applied that same correction to, and then add the same comment to all of them (possibly using the Universal Meta tool). I’m not sure how easy it is to filter for observations that you’ve recently applied a particular ID to - never tried.
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I haven’t heard of a Universal Meta tool. Could you explain what that is?
It could probably be done, but only indirectly. I’d probably just look at my reviewed observations and filter by my IDs (e.g., &ident_user_id=nathantaylor) and by disagreements (i.e., &disagreements=true). But this won’t catch situations where the other person agrees with you, so it won’t work if it has been any large amount of time since I adding the IDs. Also, figuring out what taxonomic level to set to find these observations would be tricky. iNaturalist doesn’t handle sorting by individual IDs particularly well. Though, if I’m inclined to leave comments, I usually know what observations I want to look at well enough that I don’t need fancy filtering.
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You can read about it here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/announcing-the-universal-metadata-tool-beta/53182
Basically, it adds buttons to your Identify page that you can customize. You can also define keyboard shortcuts (for example, I’ve defined M and F to add the male/female annotations). It also supports a bulk mode for performing an operation on multiple observations. So far, I’ve only used it for adding annotations and observation fields - but I think some people use it for applying IDs. Not sure about comments, but I suspect it supports that. If there are comments you use often, you could define them inside the tool, and then apply them across multiple observations.
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Partially redundant with past posts, but for the taxa I ID, I’ve found a partial explanation can be worse and more misleading than no explanation, and a full explanation is usually difficult and time-consuming to give. These are often species where the knowledge required to ID them is far beyond what would fit in a comment, and I don’t want someone to think they now know how to ID the species after reading a condensed description of my process.
Since tone doesn’t come through very well in comments, I do also worry a longer explanation will come across as a condescending knowledge-dump. It’s hard enough not to sound condescending when writing an explanation for a non-disagreeing ID, even moreso when you need to explain why someone else is wrong. Finally, if the person posting the observation or making the ID didn’t take the time to share the reasoning behind their ID, I don’t think it’s reasonable for them to expect me to provide mine. If you tell me why you made a particular ID, it lets me give a more targeted response.
There have also been cases where I’m disagreeing with someone who is a skilled IDer, and I believe their ID is an obvious mistake/oversight that they will immediately recognize when revisiting the observation. Particularly when I was a bit newer, these would sometimes be IDers with more knowledge and experience than I have. In these cases, leaving an explanation really can feel patronizing, and I worry it will look like I’m trying to draw more attention to their mistake or explain something they already know. Or, it might be someone who added the same wrong ID to dozens of different observations. In that case, it also feels pretentious and repetitive to post the same explanation for all of their IDs.
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I find it even worse when you directly ask an identifier for details on the disagreement and they ignore you. Frustrating!
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Also, deviating from my last comment, I think there are some situations where leaving a comment/explanation is expected and should be the norm. If someone provides a thoughtful explanation for their initial ID and it’s clear they have put time and effort into it, are trying to learn, and are invested in the outcome, I think it’s rude to disagree without even an acknowledgement of that and/or a brief explanation. If I’m disagreeing with another expert/specialist IDer and I don’t think the reason will be obvious to them, I think I owe them an explanation as well.
The other situation is if I’m making an ID that I think is somewhat borderline. I’m not talking about guessing; no matter how stringent you try to be or where you draw the line on how much evidence is required, there will always be observations that just barely have enough evidence to support an ID (for semi-cryptic species with high variability at least). If I anticipate that other IDers might waver on the ID or fail to see how I arrived at it, I think it’s courteous to save them the guessing and share my reasoning, that way they can more quickly decide whether or not they agree with it.
For specialist IDers, it’s also nice to do this on at least some fraction of your IDs regardless. Someone who really wants to learn may look through dozens or hundreds of your IDs (I did this to learn from the specialist IDers in my taxa-of-interest). Leaving at least an occasional explanation is a way to pay it forward and make it easier for those who come after you.
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I have to say - as an observer, I have yet to encounter this. As an identifier, 99.5% of people never respond to me when I ask for clarification
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something else…
“I am a busy, high-volume identifier and simply cannot be bothered to respect the effort of those annoying observers who continue to overflow my backlog. If an observer really cares why I disagree with their contribution, they can chase me down to prove they have sufficient interest in iNat to be worthy of distracting from my more important work.”
Not really my reason, because I would never consider making a correction to another person’s observation without an explanation. It’s just my take on the etiquette/respect question involved. I’ve opined and disputed on this question previously. Doesn’t seem to change minds on either side. It’s awkward to have this kind of factionalism develop in a cooperative enterprise, but there it is.
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