How to treat observations with different species in different pictures?
Sometimes I just “downgrade” the ID to “Plants”, with the desirable immediate effect that a picture of a species does not show anymore in the taxon page of another species. But this is not fully satisfactory, because :
- It is not friendly.
- The ID gets “downgraded” even for the picture that does match correctly the previous ID.
- It does not have the desirable effect if too many people have already agreed on the same ID.
Here is a sample, the 2nd picture is clearly not the same species:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/5231879
And of course this 2nd picture is shown in the taxon page, but it should not if we consider the mismatch:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/168847-Senna-occidentalis/browse_photos
My opinion is that we need a new feature to treat these cases correctly.
Some ideas:
(1) Add another entry in the “data quality” panel at the bottom, so that we can say that “all items provided are not consistent with a single ID” (items = pictures, or sounds, or whatever can be uploaded). This could be entitled “Consistency of items provided”.
If no one has voted for Consistency = “OK” and at least 1 person has voted Consistency = “NOK”, then say that none of the items (pictures, …) will be shown anymore in ANY taxon page (not in the ID’s taxon page, not at any upper taxon level). In that way, a single person is enough to remove an obvious inconsistency, with a single “NOK” vote. To prevent any abuse, the “OK” vote of the owner would be enough to cancel the effect of a single “NOK” vote.
If N>0 persons have voted for Consistency = “OK” and at leat N+2 persons have voted Consistency = “NOK”, then say that none of the items (pictures, …) will be shown anymore in the taxon page. (This is to prevent an abuse from the owner himself/herself, for instance).
(2) Add a contextual menu (right click) on the picture miniatures so that we can say “this picture does not match the current ID”, with the desirable effect that this picture would not be shown anymore in ANY taxon page.
But this might be difficult to manage:
- Are we going to vote for each picture and manage a score for each picture?
- If the “current ID” changes, the “wrong” picture may become the “good” one, and the “good” one may become the “wrong” one, depending on which picture the identifiers have focused.