I was looking through “casual” observations to see what was in there, and noticed a new observation, which had only one ID, and which had been checked “as good as it can be” by someone other than the observer. If that box had not been marked as such, the observation would still be in the “Needs ID” pool because there is no consensus on the ID yet. The person who checked “as good as it can be” left a comment that the user had opted out of community ID. Is this an appropriate use of “as good as it can be”?
[Edited to state that the observation was new and had only one ID]
It’s the way to get it to casual and remove from the map if id is wrong, but clearly it’s needed only in those cases and when there’re some more additional correct ids, so it depends on what’s the situation with this observation.
Let’s just make this a hypothetical, because I still can’t find it. If someone posts an observation, and gives it an ID, and opts out of community ID, is it appropriate for the next person who comes along to mark it “as good as it can be” solely on the basis of the user opting out?
I would say, no, that is an “off-brand” use of “as good as it can be”. It would be better to leave it in “Needs ID” and get some feedback from other users. If OP has the wrong ID, who knows, they might learn and change it!
The time I do think this is appropriate is when OP has opted out of community ID but has IDed to level higher than species. Then, the observation will stick in “Needs ID” even though bunches of people have IDed to species and Community ID is solid. For those I will tick “as good as can be” to get them out of the Needs ID pile.
Interesting. Had a similar case some while ago. OP suggested a wrong ID and opted out of community ID…several others had posted the correct ID. I contacted the (very active) OP and suggested to correct his suggestion, but he did not. Now the observation still occurs as the wrong species on the species lists and maps and it kind of bugs me and I wondered what to do about this…
That’s exactly the reason for this feature. Ideally there could be a discussion on the observation and a consensus would be reached, but sometimes that isn’t possible for one reason or another (usually because the observer isn’t active anymore).
Thank you. I really did not know, but will search these observations again. If the OP decides to change his mind he can just contact me to take back that vote.
I understand in your example why there is nothing more anyone other than the observer can do to improve the ID, but in the example I gave in the original post in this topic there was only one ID (by the observer, I believe) and no one else had had a chance to provide any suggested IDs because it was a new observation. (I have edited my original question to add that the observation was new and had only 1 ID.)
That’s a good question. The searching by taxonomic rank piece is certainly searchable, but I don’t know if it is possible to search for observations that are opted out of community ID. This isn’t a feature on Explore I don’t think, but I suppose it might be available via API: @pisum and @jwidness do you have any suggestions for @sgene?
The short answer is no, you can’t search for opted-out observations, either in Explore or the API.
The longer answer is that there are two opt-out data fields, the single obs opt-out, called prefers_community_taxon, and the account level opt-out, called prefers_community_taxa. Both are set to null by default, false if someone opts out, and true if they opt back in again. You can’t search by them, but they are returned in the results of API calls. In theory, you can pull down lots of observations and filter on your end for the opted-out ones using these two fields, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a relatively narrow scope because opting out is generally very uncommon and it will take a lot of API use to get even a few hits.