Question: how do you guys deal with unskilled yet very prolific identifiers? Is it worth trying to message them and talk to them about it, or better to just re-ID and hope they get the idea eventually?
I’m finding my blood pressure rising every time I see another bad identification by a particular user, who seems to mostly ID casual / cultivated things so probably rarely gets corrected. I’m talking several hundred thousand identifications, and seemingly cannot distinguish between a rose and a tulip, or a daisy and a petunia.
I often go for observations that are not the oldest (left with mostly hard to ID stuff) and not the newest but somewhere in between. I find a lot of observations I can easily ID that slipped through the cracks when they were new. I used to go to like page 50 or 100 (after setting filter to ascending), but more recently I’ve instead been setting the filter for observations added during a certain time period such as 2018-2020 and then setting the order to random.
I also do this. I pick a taxa and then I go through it.
If it is just a few pages (maybe up tp 20) I skip through from the back for easy identifiable species and then do it again but more thoroughly, which might take some time.
If it is more pages (50+) I start with IDing some of the newer ones and then also do some of the very old ones. So every day I keep up with the new incoming observations (as I think thats the important part to keep new user on the site) and then do a 2-5 old pages as well, so at some point I will get through with it.
If I have taxa that have very many pages (so that I cannot skip to the last one without using the filter) I might first go for certain species or genusses that I find easy and then might browse through certain countries or continents.
Aves have 6.36:1 observer to identifier ratio
Actinopterygii 5.46:1
Insecta 9:43:1
Magnoliopsida 11.17:1
I think that’s illustrative of why some groups are able to keep up with new observations better. Also, I suspect the CV is better at identifying birds, because there are
a) fewer species
b) plumage is often very obvious, and
c) common, easy birds come up a lot (15 species have 100,000 records or more).
Additionally, I dare say most users know birds better than plants, so the number of identifications need to clear the pile is probably lower than these other groups (just one click for RG and move on).
Another way to deal with large taxa is to break them down. When I started on genus Eristalis (Syrphidae) a while back there were 375 pages in the Needs ID pile - which is too many to go to the back (there’s a limit of 10,000 observations you can go back to). So for a while I just did Eristalis tenax, then some other of the most common species, until the genus was well under the threshold. Only once I’d gone through each major species did I then go back to the genus.
Not necessarily. Depends on the level it is stuck at. I guess the higher level the ID is the better. However, I just very recently learned how to use the ID-modul for a very specific taxon only (not including sister taxa) and love it as it for sure pushes some older observations to new levels where it might be found by specialists at some point
Also depends on filters the IDers use… I dare to say that most IDers might not go global but maybe search within a certain region for example, which decreases numbers… however, for some taxa this is really hard. I mean try to use the ID-modul for “arachnids” in almost any country and you will not easily be able to go to the last page…
Depends on what you call it, I have enough unided birds from years avo, so likely there’re many thousands of those on iNat. But days of when most birds were ided are long gone.
But to be fair… Birds still have an extremly high chance to be resolved. Only 29 of my 734 bird observations are not research grade. Compare that to my insects or arachnids where almost 2/3 are not research grade or plants with half of them not being identified…
Depends on how things go, I’m afraid with current growth they will become new molluscs with 50/50. Especially if many bird iders will diverge in other groups of stop iding. It is the best group so far, but it is not ideal.
I need another week or so to clear the accumulated unknowns from CNC across the Western Cape 1.5K.
Then I will chew around the edges of Unknowns across Rest of Africa 1.7K, (Needs ID for my Cape Peninsula only 67K) … and October’s bioblitz edges closer.
Here’s a simplistic starter draft in google docs. Will it be readable enough to be worth continuing in this way? It’s intended to be for near-novice at the global id level.
