As I said, I know of several that have deleted and re-uploaded observations, sometimes two or three times, always with their original ID, and others who have just deleted.
If I come across someone who deleted and re-uploaded, you would that the best course would be to explain opting out, and take screenshots should they choose to delete? Or are screenshots necessary?
Really, I thought that community input was kind of the basis for how iNats works.
I am curious though, why is it that when I don’t leave an ID explanation, people come on here and complain, but when I do explain, then apparently I’m trying to prove them wrong?
Thanks for the tip. I’ll keep that in mind.
it is sad but, after all, it is a legitimate behaviour.
I have encountered the same behaviour (I would say it is not an issue) and I have been also blocked by an user who, evidently, did not like my IDs. Of course, this person had the right to do so.
Back to “your” cases, I would say that, unless their identification is totaly unplausible, I would try to live and let live. Apart this, you can try to explain why their ID is unlikely or, as an extrema ratio solution, ID to genus or to a higher rank the observation in order to keep it from getting to RG.
I think the behavior described at the start of this thread is very frustrating. I’m glad we have the Forum to vent about it.
That said, I have a few more comments. (Don’t I always?) First, if the observer insults you, flag the post for iNaturalist to deal with. (Or choose to ignore it. I have chosen that sometimes. The observer can feel insulted and hurt by the disagreement. They’re foolish to feel that way, of course, but some iNatters are immature and/or very thin-skinned, so pity rather than - or in addition to - anger may be the best response.)
Second, the observer deleting a post because I disagreed with the ID is a waste of my time and effort, yes, but it’s a small percentage of the effort I put into IDing. I’d just say, So It Goes.
Third, deleting a post because of a disagreeing ID and then reposting it is very bad form and suggests (though doesn’t prove!) a willingness to reach RG through deception. (Ignorance is the more likely cause, though we can feel it’s deception because we know more about how iNaturalist works than most observers do.) Possible responses include ignore, or ID and move on, or explain about opting out, or contact the help desk. If it’s a pattern, contact the help desk. We want those people educated or out of here!
People can delete observations for good or what I consider very bad reasons. That’s something to vent about sometimes, but acceptable. If somebody frequently deleted observations I had ID’d (and I noticed), I’d stop IDing for them, as I don’t usually ID for people who mark their observations Private (without providing some location data in the notes) or who opt out of my adding their observations to traditional projects they haven’t joined but post things I’d like to add to a traditional project I care about. (A tiny bit of totally unnoticed revenge for a tiny annoyance.)
And as to protecting GBIF . . . researchers who download citizen science data and don’t make any effort to check it are damn fools and there’s only so much you can do to protect fools.
I agree, there’s little that can be done. Even flagging an insult is likely out, since the observation was deleted. I’ve run into this a number of times, but happening twice in a week made it more noticeable.
Here is a line from a paper published last month:
“We did not review or attempt to correct any of the identifications in the iNaturalist dataset"
That’s disturbing. And the degree to which it is disturbing depends on the nature of the paper, the manner in which the dataset was used, and how/where it was published.
I know that from time to time iNat provides a list of papers that have used iNat data, but I haven’t tried to read many of them or even their abstracts.
Might be an interesting exercise. Or perhaps a discouraging one.
I have not seen this. I have however, ID’d someones observation, and then they completely change the observation to a different set of pictures of another organism! Without context, someone seeing the new observation with my old ID still probably thinks im an idiot!
I have read several papers that used iNat data and they are invariably incredibly frustrating to read. It is rare that one of the authors is a regular user, and therefore misconceptions about the data is collected and how it is verified are abundant. One from a couple of years ago defined Research Grade as: “Identified by two or more experts”, glad to see the authors did their due diligence.
This is why I tend to get caught up keeping faulty ID’s off and get annoyed when people attempt to end run around the ID process.
In my experience, most taxon experts here find any identification other than the most accurate, precise, up-to-date one “totally unplausible.”
Ah yes, I’ve seen that occasionally as well.
Also bizarre!
Yeah, I’ve had this happen to me too. I kinda wish iNat inserted a short line if an observation gets edited after another user interacts with the observation. Something like “user deleted a photo” “user uploaded a photo”. I’ve had other types of situations where this would have helped too.
Can you provide a link to the paper?
I don’t know. I did before and the link was removed. If you’re interested I can message it to you.
The complete sentence in the study is as follows: We did not review or attempt to correct any of the identifications in the iNaturalist dataset since our aim was to make comparisons to the iNaturalist data as it was.
Moderator note: Link to specific paper removed as it was previously. The forum isn’t a place to call out other iNat users.
That makes sense.
I don’t want to get off track, but that study is terrible. They used Discoverlife for many of their specimens, even though DL is pretty well known to be incomplete. For example DL explicitly states for one genus that the guide is not complete and to use a different specific key. That key was not mentioned in the paper’s methods.
I’d recommend that you give the paper a read, it has many problems. Reviewing specimens and not reviewing the iNat records was a bad idea.
I did read that article when it was first mentioned.
My understanding was - we want to prove that iNat IDs are terrible, and we set up our study to prove what we know. They did not make a good impression on this NON-scientist.
iNat makes a good target for people who don’t use because they don’t like it, because they have never learnt to use it.
In my case, I don’t upload my own observations because I’m too busy trying to keep on top of IDing other people’s observations. My observations do end up in an external database (along with the iNat data) that folks consult, so it’s not like I’m withholding my own observations.
I do occasionally get info about rarities on iNat, but that’s pretty rare. For the most part, I already know where and when various species are likely to be found. That’s how I can do IDs. And as pointed out by another poster, I’m usually the one who points out that a given observation is in fact a rarity. Otherwise, the organism would have been ID’d as something more common.
But clearly, YMMV