Yes, that’s true (luckily).
I have withdrawn a few as well over the years, but it still lists them in my own 'you have id’d" list as I am a maverick…kinda hurts my self esteem xD esp as each case was very similar species that we were discussing, and learning, and I switched them all to the ‘final answer’ and withdrew earlier suggestion so its odd it still tells me i’m a maverick! Cause no? I agree? I’s a turnoff to ID further, tbh, my brain reads it as 'haaaaaaaa you were wronggggggggg you stupid idiot" when really it wasn’t exactly the case to begin with.
To be clear: I don’t have an issue with the notice of maverick and the word makes sense, and I want to know if further info or knowledge comes along: it’s the not erasing that status when withdraw/change that I feel hurts the learning process, at least for me it’s a huge turnoff.
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Page with maverics shows only active observations, so if some still count for you when you reided it, it worth checking what’s going on there.
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If you have withdrawn your ID. Or agreed with the new ID - now you know it is that.
It will not appear on your maverick list. That is for IDs you still have as active.
Have another look at each obs in your maverick list and see what is listed as your active ID. I checked - you have a spider and a butterfly - both with your active ID - you need to withdraw, or agree with the new ID (if you can)
And then allow the system time to update - perhaps overnight?
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It’s showed seven mavericks for me when I made the post that should not have been maverick.
I’ll check again.
update 2 add: Okay, I found those two, which were NOT there when I made the post about all the mavericks still being mavs, but now all the rest are gone. Extra odd, is that spider that you saw when you looked, I had ID’d correctly (I’m making my own lil book for things I’ve found) and it is literally in my book correctly; so I have no clue why it had that odd maverick on it. Confused, but everything is fixed (for now…?).
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I check my mavericks often. Whether it was my fault, or a glitch, or the Community ID has left me behind - I want to know and resolve My Wrong as best I can. All part of my learning curve in nature (and on iNat)
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Same! That’s why it’s in my only public journal post (a list of useful iNat URLs)
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thats how i found the link last week!! i was trying to figure out how to find them and it popped up in a google search for me!
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My journal post was in a Google search result?
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I googled something like “iNaturalist find mavericks” and it came up with a few options, one being a post with a link to a journal page that had a bunch of helpful iNat url’s and one being the shortcut to mavericks. Public journal pages often show up to me on google - I find it easier to find what I need for iNat than searching iNat directly, as there will either be someone’s public journal page or a forum thread about it that turns up!
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I’m just glad it turned out to be helpful, even if it was redundant (since the shortcut also turned up). I used to wonder if I should make that post a draft, since as far as I knew I am the only one who uses it.
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BTW, back on the subject of the Needs ID pile:
there’s a lot in the PBS “It’s Okay to Be Smart” project that still needs to be Identified. there’s a few prolific people in there who have said before that their workflow is to upload without IDs in there, though, so you may want to filter or ignore those.
I have had a similar experience and started identifying to a level I am confident. this might be Order, Family or even Kingdom if it is Unknown, just to get the ball rolling. Someone else will help with the details.
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A major problem that only adds to the pile of observations in need of expert eyes is how iNaturalist handles the subscription feed (that is, poorly). My focus is on microscopic observations, where often it is non-trivial, even for experienced observers, to place an organism in the proper kingdom(!).
We identifiers have our areas of interest and are subscribed to those taxa. Some of us will also subscribe to visually similar taxa to catch the frequent mistakes (as mistakes are common per the above statement about kingdoms, and furthermore the iNaturalist machine suggestions are virtually useless for protists). Since I want to help people with their peritrich IDs, you’d better believe I need to watch the stentor and rotifer taxa as well.
The problem, not-insignificant in my opinion, is that an observation will only ever make it into my feed if the very first ID placed it into one of my subscribed taxa. If someone observes something and labels it “State of Matter Life” (a very common ID for microscope observations), then you come along and say “Hey, this is a rotifer, let’s ID it as such and someone with more knowledge will be able to help” … it will never make it into my feed and I will never see it unless I go out of my way to search for it.
I’ve made the suggestion to change the behavior of taxon subscriptions. They should be helping to put observations in front of obviously-interested identifiers without giving identifiers yet another task just to find these observations (these people subscribed to the taxon, after all!). My suggestion was removed in August 2021 and I was told something to the effect of, “Not interested in changing that behavior, but you can try asking again later.” Asking again later only got the response of, effectively, “Still no.”
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There are now around 34,368,900 needs ID observations, so we are mostly keeping up with Identifying but are going back slightly. Overall we are doing pretty well, we wouldn’t want all the observations to be ID or there would be nothing to do :)
Welcome to the forum @rhesusguy
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Well, why don’t you just bookmark a search for observations with an id of Life? You can skip those you’re not interested in and id those you can. Subsciptions can’t be changed to show you something without an id you need.
Your answer is akin to “Why don’t you just look at everything on the site that needs ID and identify it if you know what it is?” The response should be obvious: time. This site should value the time of people willing to donate their personal time towards identifying. If you demand that identifiers jump through hoops and sort through huge piles of observations they’re not interested in, you’ll end up with a deficit of IDs, which is exactly what the site has now.
Subscriptions can absolutely be changed to put an observation in my feed when it is moved into my taxa of interest. It should not function for only the first identification.
Some identifiers like @rhesusguy may not always be down in the weeds, and that would be way, way more useful if their work could be automatically handed off to those who are. If they’re going to spend the time sorting the top level buckets because that’s where their interest/knowledge/confidence is right now, the smart thing for the site to do is to then put those observations in front of the people interested in those taxa. That way everyone is working to their own interest/knowledge/confidence and everyone benefits.
I don’t have the time or inclination to look at every single observation that needs ID. Some people do. I do have the time and inclination to look at every single observation in my taxa of interest. The site should help us work together automatically.
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Time can’t stop you opening an id tab for rotifers though? It will show you every observation with an id and you don’t even need to open it again, just lock the tab and change url to add all the taxa you’re interested in.
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The number of observations in different categories does not have any inherent meaning or value. If making the Needs ID pile a little smaller makes you feel better, have at it! If not, don’t worry about it!
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I’ve been working on plant observations in New England that are currently at the genus level and I happened to notice the 2,978 Taraxacum observations that need an ID. Now, my understanding of genera like dandelions and hawthorns is that the species are difficult to tell apart, even for taxonomists, and that the taxonomies of these genera are very much in flux (possibly because there’s so much hybridization and, for dandelions at least, production of viable seeds without fertilization). In such cases, is it reasonable to mark observations as Cannot Be Improved at the genus level, assuming the photos are indeed of that genus?
Pros: Doing so removes the observations from the Needs ID pile, which makes identifiers feel less overwhelmed. It would also mark these observations as Research Grade, which would give researchers who concentrate on RG observations for data a more complete idea of range, for example.
Cons: Removing these observations from Needs ID before they are at species level means they may be missed by dandelion or hawthorn experts (I am not one!), although my guess is that experts in such genera are just as likely to look at RG observations as ones that need IDs.
Thoughts?
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