Misidentification, accountability, and bullying

[kiwifergus]

@cthawley

I disagree pretty strongly. If you know that there isn’t a way to conclusively ID an organism from visual inspection or the evidence given, it’s entirely appropriate to disagree with the ID as @alexis18 and @mamestraconfigurata have laid out. This is the situation that the disagree text refers to when you ID with an explicit disagreement

and there has been an extremely long history of debate over this. This comment from @loarie to me is fundamental to the discussion:

@loarie

Branch Disagreements
Regarding ‘branch disagreements’, upupa-epops’s use case Let’s say someone posted a very blurry picture of a ladybug... is the one we had in mind. While we agree it should be rare and backed up by the community and comments, the idea is that there should be some mechanism for the community to role back the taxon that an observation is ‘filed under’ if the observer is not responsive and if the community consensus is that while it could be Seven-spotted Ladybug its really impossible to tell and we should err on the side of caution.

Regarding @Pisum and other’s concern that we’re lowering the bar with branch disagreements, eg: note that with the proposed new prompt, you’ll no longer need to know that there’s no way anyone could confirm / deny, you’ll just need to think that there’s no way anyone could confirm or deny. that’s a slightly lower bar for disagreement. those who ignored the letter of the current prompt to disagree would now have the new prompt wording on their side. the idea was actually to raise the bar (ie make it rarer for people to ‘branch disagree’). The concern with the existing ‘evidence’ based language is that if @charlie observed a plant and ID’d it to species because he’s an ‘expert’ but his photo didn’t capture all the characters necessary to identify it to species, someone else shouldn’t roll it back to genus merely because the ‘evidence was not sufficient’. The ‘I don’t think we can be certain…’ language was meant to capture the spirit that the community doesn’t think anyone is intentionally/knowingly advocating for that species which would eliminate the charlie situation (we can be reasonably certain charlie knows what he’s doing) but would cover for example, someone blindly clicking on a computer vision suggestion (in most of these cases the community can ascertain that the precision associated with such an ID wasn’t intentional).

Again, the idea is that the ‘branch disagreement’ lever should be very rarely pulled, so we agree with concerns about this lever being over-used. But we think the use case articulated by upupa-epops is legitimate, especially if the identification in question makes the observation sufficiently unusual/unlikely that it decreases the credibility of the site (even though it ‘could’ be that taxon) and the observer is unresponsive. But if folks think this is too niche a use case for a tool that could be broadly misused, thats fair.

When you can’t see enough evidence, explicitly disagree ONLY if the community supports it. If you get push back from anyone, then it stands to reason that the community DOES NOT SUPPORT IT. Yet time and time again, I ask someone to consider withdrawing their explicit disagreement because I am asserting my finer ID (with reason), and they traipse out that explicit modal dialogue wording to back up why they are being an a-hole over it.

In fact, this issue is a good example of exactly what we are talking about. The wording says one thing, but the site developers intended something different, and yet without an understanding of what took place on that conversation we have people asserting that their way is the right way, even though it conflicts with the statements made by the developers, and conflicts with the iNat mission.

Hey, I could be wrong… but I am not arguing that I am right here… just that there is ALWAYS more to something than even the experts can be aware of, and that should factor into play in identifications as well. I don’t care if you are the worlds pre-eminent expert in the field, or have read the latest books, and so on. There is ALWAYS something else that can be brought to the table, and to back-handedly dismiss the input of others because a modal said you could… JFC…

Don’t get me wrong… experts are great. They are right more times than I am, and for that I am eternally grateful! I would not have learnt what I have without the sharing of knowledge that they have given me… but much of that knowledge would never have been given to me had I not had the ability to challenge them with my own ideas.