If the iNatter who said No Flowers has since gone, dormant - that obs’ annotations are broken forever.
At least rejecting Community Taxon was a ‘deliberate’ choice (and the observer’s choice which the observer can change) - while No Flowers might have been a mistake, a misunderstanding.
“No Evidence of Flowering,” means that there is “No Evidence of Flowering,” at the time of the observation, not evidence of what happened in the past or may happen in the future.
Lionel Hutz might say “No, Evidence of Flowering!”
I had then same experience with Cicadidae annotations. I’ve seen ‘cannot be determined’ many times or sometimes even the wrong sex.
Most annoying part is when the life stages are wrong. Because we need these for research. I do e.g. differentiate between freshly molten and adult cicadas, many characteristics are different and change during the drying process. By grouping them correctly via annotations our lives get a bit easier. Assuming the annotations are correct.
Both are frustrating. Especially if the user goes dormant. And does not answer my friendly reminder to change his annotation…
It would be nice if the new feature could be like a voting system with options: If more than 50% of people vote for a specific annotation, this one will be selected.
If we ever decided to implement this voting system maybe symbols could be introduced (e.g. for male/female/cannot be determined) and the number of votes could be depicted next to the symbols. This would help in annotating faster and in a more transparent manner.
I personally would love this since always clicking on ‘select’ consumes so much time and people at home and in the library are always giving me a side eye for making million click sounds with my laptop haha :)
Agreed, an override system for annotations like we have for IDs (>2/3 majority needed for override when IDs conflict) or DQA fields (which I believe is just a simple majority) would both be useful and would bring annotations in line with how IDs and DQA work.
There are plenty of old observations with incorrect annotations from people who no longer use the site, or users who either inadvertently or willfully ignore requests to change annotations when they are shown to be wrong.
Why should the only “most recent edits” be considered correct when they could be incorrect? It has already been requested for annotations to function like community ID. I think that would make it more collaborative, which iNaturalist strives to be, does it not?
Just a suggestion, but you could use the “Insect Life Stage” observation field to “override” the annotation in cases where it’s incorrect. The code I use to download butterfly observations from iNat uses the life stage annotation (defaulting to adult in cases where it is not set), unless the Insect Life Stage field has been added, in which case it uses the field value. So before I download a dataset from iNat I go through all the observations I plan to download, and I ensure that all adults have life stage annotation = null/adult, and that all larvae/egg/pupae have their life stage annotation set appropriately. If any are set incorrectly, I add the Insect Life Stage field with the correct value. I’d prefer to be able to correct the annotation, but this is a stop-gap solution.
I made this project as a holding bin until (if) this gets implemented
it wouldn’t solve the issue, but i think iNat should at least notify the annotator when their annotation has been downvoted, if no other changes are made. i have added incorrect annotations by accident before, and despite being a regular user of the site in general, i have no idea that they have been getting downvoted unless someone takes the time to reach out and tag me. the fact there’s currently no site feedback (dashboard notifications, etc.) when you’re getting downvoted makes little sense to me.
This would be so amazing to have…