not sure how useful this might be, but i went ahead and made a page to summarize identifications by category (including an “Other”, or uncategorized, category). it could provide a way for folks without direct access to the database to quickly get these stats for different sets of parameters.
So I tried that URL and got 77 category Other identifications (0.4%). I tried it again with a much earlier start date and got the same number, suggesting that they were all in 2020. Is anyone seeing any in this category from previous years?
I’ve got a full 2.2% Other. I wonder what the difference is between us that I’ve got proportionately so many more…
and 65 maverick! time to go fix those…
…
for what it’s worth, it looks like there was some experimentation with how identifications trigger observation reindexing early in 2020 (see https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/commits/main/app/models/identification.rb), which may coincide with the appearance of most of these uncategorized identifications. probably what needed to be fixed got fixed, but maybe doing a lookback to see why these changes may have triggered the problem might be warranted (just to understand what not to do in the future). i suppose the data should be cleaned up at some point, too (which i guess probably is the ultimate fix for this bug report at this point).
just looking at the code history, it looks like changing anything on the observation – annotations, identifications, quality flags, etc. should trigger recategorization of all the identifications. i tested this by adding a flowering annotation on an observation where my id was previously uncategorized, and the identification was categorized properly after the fact.