48% of my observations from 2025 are at RG. A year ago, when I generated my Year in Review stats for 2024, 54% of those observations were RG. To see how much progress has been made over the course of a year, I regenerated that page: now those are up to 58% RG. So progress has been made (and thanks to everyone who has helped), but it’s still far from complete. I’m guessing virtually everyone here can say the same.
@Ec0pete, you asked the question. Was that just curiosity? Do you have some thoughts or suggestions to share, in response to all of our replies?
That statement assumes that we do everything based on what’s most ‘fun’. At times I might feel like I’d like to upload more (I’ve certainly got a big enough, and constantly growing, backlog!), but there’s just so much needing identifying that I really can’t justify doing it. So yes, my stats would suggest the same, and I do enjoy identifying (overall) - but my stats aren’t really a good indication of how I would weight the ‘fun’ level of identifying versus observing.
Okay, fair point - I don’t actually love uploading. But I do enjoy seeing IDs come in, particularly for ‘what on earth is that‘ things.
As for my ranking of IDing fun? It would depend on what I’m dealing with. If I’m trawling through a bunch of terrible photos trying in vain to make anything useful out of them, it can be pretty low. Finding the one I can suddenly take from limbo to species is very satisfying, 10/10; going through and clearing out old Needs ID of a taxon maybe 8ish; other things can depend on my mood - and definitely how much pressure I feel under to keep the queue under some sort of control.
I hope Lynn understands that I made that comment in the spirit of fun, and out of immense gratitude for all her identifying, and that I by no means intended to make unwelcome assumptions about her (or anyone else’s) motivations!
I completely understand the spirit in which you made that comment! If we all can’t laugh a bit about our obsessions and preferences for observing and identifying - well, then perhaps we need to relax a bit. Certainly I do!
Fair enough - I guess it’s just an idea (‘you do [this thing you feel you should do but might dislike]? you must love it!’) I’ve come across before in other contexts that quite bothers me as an attitude. Sorry, didn’t mean to jump down anyone’s throat!
Thanks @larry216, My experience is the same as most of the other people who have posted on this thread. I notice that 18 of the last 100 observations I have posted have not yet gone to research grade. Going back to 2022 when I first joined iNat, I notice 8 of my first 100 obs are not yet research grade. I fully appreciate why some observations don’t reach research grade. Poor photo quality, obscure and difficult to ID organisms etc. There are other obs that I have posted that are clear and of reasonably well known species that may sit for years without an update and one day I will open the dashboard and see that someone has trawled back through my list and confirmed the ID. This has inspired me to seek out iNat users who share an interest in my field of expertise and dig back through their observations to see if I cany find any to upgrade.
This is one of the reasons why whenever I’m IDing, I set my filters to sort from oldest to newest. I regularly find observations that have fallen through the cracks just because they’re so old and people just don’t seem to get to them. Once I give it some kind of ID, even if it’s just at Kingdom level, it bumps it up and it will often get given a more precise ID pretty quickly.