Just a note: I did not attempt to “call out” or “target” anyone, nor would I.
I identified information that another user asked for. I looked through the thread and did not see it nor any Moderator note on any other post noting that any link had been removed. I was studiously neutral and in fact noted the fuller sentence. You may wish to read through additional replies that specifically mention names.
Sorry, but this felt a mite target-y.
If you see responses that aim to specifically call out individuals in a negative light, please flag them. Moderators are not always able to see every bit of content here. If you’d like to discuss this more feel free to message us, thank you.
I assumed Moderators could see all content and am surprised to learn they cannot.
My quibble is that the rule of “Assume others mean well” is not being applied: words like “targeted” and “call out” are neither fair nor accurate.
That said, the conversation had veered completely away from that aspect and I for one am very happy to let it continue in its new vein, however I did want to publicly address that I had no malicious motivation in posting the link. My motivation was to provide the information another user asked for, period. Thank you for your understanding of this.
By “see”, I meant “read”, as we are a small team of volunteers.
More weight is not given to a ID challenging a previously RG observation. When a disagreement occurs, it does require an over 3/4ths majority to progress past the lowest common taxon, but that is not equivalent. A simple majority rule would make dealing with serial agreers even more of a nightmare than it already is, which is a far more prevalent problem that erroneous disagreeing IDs.
Edit to add: Serial agreers are also the primary reason old RG observations have to be challenged in the first place.
This has been explained many times in many threads, including ones you’ve participated in. In addition to what’s been said in all those other threads, there is simply no pleasing everyone. There are observers that get mad if I do leave comments explaining the diagnostic characterizes, acting as if I called them stupid rather than just politely, albeit succinctly, pointing out the relevant features.
This is indeed frustrating, but as you say, these specific cases are few. Most identifiers, especially serious identifiers, rather than just people learning the site, are more than happy to explain IDs if they get tagged with follow up questions.
When I have had erroneous IDs added to my own observations from a user that was afterwards unresponsive, I’ve just tagged other knowledgeable identifiers and gotten it resolved.
Because people are wrong sometimes. I get corrected on plants I agreed with 2-3 years ago. When it happens, I realize I didn’t look closely at the flowers or leaves or location and it’s not what I agreed to. If no one checks those, they are RG forever erroneously.
I agree with the OP that the situation is indeed annoying, but I’ve also expressed that the situation isn’t “the end of the world”, so to speak:
I see this thread as venting about specific observers that are doing something questionable/frustrating, not as a blanket complaint about all observers. I imagine that most (or at least many) people on this thread participate on iNat as both an observer and an identifier. Both observers and identifiers are capable of behaving inappropriately/misguidedly. I find myself equally, if not more, frustrated with identifiers that take actions that contradict the purpose of iNat (of which serial agree-ers are the prime example).
To be extra clear, making an honest misidentification is not what I mean by behaving inappropriately. Even experts make mistakes, which is why it is so important that all observations, including ones that reached RG long ago, be open to further review. RG isn’t a good outcome if the RG ID isn’t the correct ID.
The iNat database would also not exist in a useable quailty without identifiers. But again, most identifiers are observers too.
I’ve lost count of the amount of times this has had to be explained, but here we go again: if you want an explanation: ask for it, if I don’t answer, it may be that I didn’t see it (I have 285K ID’s, I get a few more notifications than most), or it may be you mis-spelled my username (had that happen several times, one guy kept capitalizing) send a DM. Assuming that if someone didn’t include a explanation they must not mean well is a rather uncharitable view of the situation.
It also wouldn’t exist without identifiers. To re-iterate an example, an iNat blog a while back said that 87% of the ID’s were coming from the top 2000 identifiers which at the time was 1.6% of people who had placed ID’s. So 1.6% of people doing 87% of the work, but we’re also supposed to explain when we disagree, and not get annoyed when things that increase the workload happen?
Again, I have 285K ID’s, I get things at a much higher rate than you do. To re-iterate another previous example: a few months ago there was a discussion on private location observations. Someone pointed out that there aren’t that many marked private and it shouldn’t be that big of an issue. I checked and this person ran into an average of .89 private observations per week, I run into 3.9 per week. So I was seeing 4 times what they were seeing. Things that you hardly ever run into that are a mild annoyance (like deleting observations), I might be seeing a bit more often.
By default inat will send you a notification when someone adds a dissenting ID. If you are somehow managing to miss seeing these, then perhaps you might share some sympathy with the people who have enough taxa expertise to confidently disagree (who are reviewing and correcting the IDs on many thousands of observations which languished a long time without expert review), also missing a notification of your query?
Death before dishonour? Why do you think deleting an observation because of a single dissenting ID is better than giving the community enough time (and yes, perhaps that will be a few more years) to come to a consensus, either agreeing with you, or with the dissenter.
Why would your observation be less valuable if it somehow later returns to RG status with either the ID that the dissenter suggested, or your original estimation?
IMO that’s actually a much better outcome, because it will flag those suggestions into the “similar species” list, helping future observers and identifiers consider all the possibilities before forming their opinion.
With my best “not age shaming those bloody kids on my lawn or those stubborn old people voting for idiot conservatives” hat on … and tilted to an age appropriate angle for where I fit on that spectrum … this might be a generational thing …
So… It’s ok to be wrong. It’s ok for others to to be wrong. It’s ok to not be sure if you’re right or wrong. Being wrong isn’t a skeleton you need to bury in the backyard.
Every expert I know didn’t get to be expert at what they are expert at without being wrong about it a lot along the way.
When someone is wrong we have a chance to learn something. It doesn’t matter who it was that was wrong, it makes both sides look a little harder than they otherwise might have.
From that point there are two paths you can take: the one that I think is Right, where everyone listens to everyone else, for as much or as little they have to add to the subject, and a new, better, consensus forms around all the salient facts that were revealed. Or the one that I think is wasteful and wrong, where everyone digs themselves into trenches, and hurls abuse and bombs at the people in the other trenches, and if they don’t think they can win, they scorch the earth as they retreat so there’s nothing else for others to win either.
It’s ok for observations to not be RG. That’s the nectar that will bring you more experts to pollinate consensus.
You omitted the rest of my quote which describes where I think deletion is OK. When after asking, there is no response and the situation is confused.
Is this accurate? The number seems low and, anyway, it is not the fault of the observers when the ratio of people to amount of work is small. Maybe others also need to ask for help? My point about this post being an unnecessary criticism of observers still stands. Would it not be a better option to encourage observers rather than criticize them?
25% of IDs are made by 130 users - from published research.
Well - observers can help to iD a slice. Identifiers are all volunteers, fitting this in around day jobs and RL commitments - just like observers.
Yes, this is accurate. It was from an iNat blog post celebrating the 100 millionth observation back in 2020. It was the top 1000 people were putting in 70% of the ID’s, and next 1000 were putting in an additional 17%. At the time that was 1.6% of identifiers. Now you might be thinking “well that was a few years ago, surely its improved”. It hasn’t: note that at that time there were about a million observers and 120K identifiers, so about 12% of users had placed at least 1 ID on someone else’s observation. Currently there are 3.2 million observers and 380K identifiers, which actually drops slightly to 11.8%. There are still only a small percentage of people putting in the vast majority of the ID’s.
Well, there’s 280 people that I’ve reviewed more than 100 of their observations, my DM’s are filled with people who’ve reached out with questions on how to separate difficult species, I’ve written 6 guides on identifying that were rather well received in my journal. I think I’m a pretty encouraging type of guy, am I missing anything?
Through the magic of the forum software, the way I quoted it, anyone can click the little ‘v’ arrow in the top right corner of what I quoted to re-read the entirety of what you said.
I didn’t misrepresent what you said, but you haven’t answered the question - why does a single unexplained dissenting opinion warrant deleting an observation to hide its existence? And how is that practically any different from a single unexplained agreeing ID?
Why is that better than just letting the system work as it was designed and giving other people from the community time to weigh in and converge on a proper community consensus?
But it is the fault of observers if they delete observations that people have taken the time to ID correctly when the only reason for deleting them is “they didn’t like being disagreed with”, especially if they didn’t give the community time to see and refine the identification.
How is correctly identifying someone’s observation “criticizing them and not encouraging them”? Nobody is abusing users for getting an ID wrong. The problem case is people ‘abusing’ the system to insist on promoting a wrong ID instead of letting the community consultation process run its natural course in the full view of everyone.
Since we crossed 200 million observations, I would be very curious what the current percentages are. Have we improved, or is it still just a couple of percent doing 90% of the ID’s?
See the paper @DianaStuder linked to above, that was published mid last year.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/observers-deleting-observations-when-identifiers-disagree-with-them/54086/96
It was published last year, but didn’t it only go up to 2021 stats?
Oh, you’re right - it was published 2023, and they note “approximately 280,000 identifers to approximately 2.5 million observers as of January 2023” - but it looks like they might be analysing the data set from a previous analysis in 2022 …
And I was also going to note that this is the all time stats, so if you look at the trend, then the proportion of identifiers for the last 6 - 12 months is almost certainly going to be notably smaller than these numbers again.
@pisum is good at crunching iNat stats for us. Please?
(Impossible to find a needle in a social media haystack! Where are iNat’s annual stats for 2023 hidden?)
Maybe the annual stats are in a blog post? I have to go check a moth trap, or I’d look for you.