I’ve started noticing an odd pattern. Users from the Czech Republic tagging mosses as Mexican Chickadees.
At first, I thought it was a fluke, then really odd as it has happened several times per day, then I looked it up and found that “Moss” in the Czech language is “Mech” and, for the non-birders out there, “Mech” is also the 4-letter alpha code for Mexican Chickadees.
So I assume the Czech users type “Mech” and pick the first result which mis-IDs the observation as a Chickadee. Don’t know how to fix this exactly, but thought it was worth a mention.
Potentially related, but the entry of the 4-letter AOU code MECH for Mexican Chickadee appears to have been in place for multiple years. So I’m not sure why that would have only started being an issue recently.
We have a similar issue with our Western Cape Fynbos which includes a family called Restionaceae. Unfortunately ‘some bird’ is coded at REST. Apologies to Reunion ! Birds rule iNat ?
A possible solution would be for iNat to catch Kingdom disagreement. Which cannot work for the first ID.
I forget which bird’s code, but a curator moved it down from being the first default common name.
Typing rest in the search box brings me, that bird almost 1K obs, then a project in Reston (where ?) 111K obs, and only third our Family which has 63K obs. Sorry - Reston has twice as many obs as Restionaceae. But why do the birds win ?
Perhaps it weights an exact match against a name (“rest” matches the entirety of “REST”) over partial/prefix matches (“rest” doesn’t match the entirety of “Restionaceae”, just the start)
I always toggle that leaderboard to sp. Then we get San Antonio, and Ostrava disappears down the ranking. Using RG % as a proxy for quality of obs and activity of identifiers
Ostrava 11% vs the umbrella project at 26% (pretty good, a quarter IDed across the world !)
Yes thank you - resti does work as expected. But those 4 letter bird codes will often trigger confusion for non-birders. Who expects ‘rest’ to be the name of a life form - in English, not an other language - where the confusion allows for our multiple human languages.
I deleted the pesky MECH and REST codes. Those 4 letter codes were created for bird banding in the US, not an international database of observations of all life forms! If anyone finds any more, please delete them.
Deleting them all may not be a popular decision, I know some people use the banding codes as shorthand when typing in identifications, rather than typing the full name. I don’t feel super strongly about it, but I don’t focus on bird identification.
Please don’t. The banding codes are incredibly useful especially when I upload acoustic files from Merlin where the app doesn’t give suggestions. I always use the banding codes because they are so fast and convenient.
They shouldn’t be deleted. That’s not the solution. There are lots and lots of other names that cause similar issues. iNaturalist isn’t just for birds in North America, but that is part of its scope.
I think deleting alpha codes would be like deleting names in uncommon languages because the vast majority of users don’t find them useful. No, because we are a global site, we include names in uncommon languages, and we include alpha codes.
Most iNaturalist observations are from the US or Canada.
Sorry moss and grass people!