I so far haven’t seen any arguments that convince me of the usefulness of mass opting out of community ID, but if users wish to do so, fine with me – I just want a practical way for IDers to be able to filter out such observations and avoid wasting their time.
There are a couple of things I am having difficulty understanding, however.
First, if a user is diligent about following up on IDs provided for their observations, I don’t see how mass opting out is a more effective way to deal with problematic IDs than simply opting out on a case-by-case basis if necessary. One is, presumably, checking all IDs received in either situation, so how is it more work to respond to the (hopefully) minority of IDs that are problematic (individual opt-out) than to update one’s own ID every time an expert adds a refining ID (mass opt-out)?
Second, it seems to me difficult to reconcile mass opting out of community IDs with the principle that users should not agree to any ID they cannot confirm themselves. Unless one only observes taxa that one has advanced expertise in oneself, it is likely some proportion of observations are going to be in unfamiliar taxa where one is reliant on the expertise of others. Perhaps others are more talented than I, but my experience is that even if one tracks down the identification literature (not always feasible) or asks the expert how they arrived at their ID, this knowledge doesn’t automatically translate into being able to look at the photos and see and correctly interpret the relevant traits. And yet if one has opted out of community ID, the only way for an expert’s specific ID to be shown for the observation is to agree to it oneself. Meaning that in such cases, one either has the choice of not updating one’s ID due to lack of ability to take the observation further (leaving the observation perpetually at a broader taxon and potentially annoying other users who keep trying to add a more precise ID), or one agrees to an ID one cannot confirm oneself, which is discouraged because it means that “research grade” no longer represents two independent verifications.
It depends on your workload. I just hit 100k observations and I regularly get 100-200 notifications a day. To see if something is problematic you have to review everything regardless so nothing saves that step.
We are also waiting for notifications management (see other discussions).
I would like NOT to see notifications of IDs by others that are not in conflict with my IDs on other people observations.
As often, features depend on each other. The existence, or the lack, of a feature impacts the content of a request for another feature. It is suboptimal to ask for features independently of each other. I also wonder if this may even affect the votes: if a feature request is too complex (because of the lack of integration with other features, or other requests), this becomes a reason for some people to discuss more about it and to vote less for it.
100-200 notifications a day? Have you turned off notifications of agreeing IDs? I have 25K+ IDs and only get a handful of notifications, those being the ones I need to attend to.
Not sure if this is still an issue: Not receiving notifications for comments associated with agreeing IDs, but if it is, the only way to see if there are comments in agreeing IDs is to check out the agreeing IDs? Otherwise, it may be best-practice to not leave comments in IDs?
Indeed, and in fact I already turned off these “Confirming ID’s” notification in my settings!
I would like also to turn off the notifications of “Refining ID’s”.
For instance, when I quickly identify observations as Trifolieae, I need not be notified later that these are Trifolium dubium and those are Medicago lupulina.
I figure I receive at least 1 notification per 5 identifications (with confirming IDs off) within 24 hours and more trickle in the following week. When I identify Hymenoptera, I’ll wake up to 50+ notifications regularly.
On the original topic
I think yes, but iNat is whatever you want to make of it and many people upload and never revisit anything. A recent look through City Nature Challenge unknowns reminded me of this.
The ‘power users’ like @silversea_starsong and @aspidoscelis and @finatic (RIP) who have opted out are some of my favorite naturalists to debate with.
I haven’t, because sometimes it is useful for me to know if something was agreed on or needed further review. Unfortunately there is no way to distinguish between the first agreement, and consecutive ones. People also add comments to IDs sometimes and they may not be separate and show as a notification (such as when pressing agree, hitting edit, and adding a comment that way).
I think there is a good alternative to completely removing the option of global opting-out, which is clearly useful to @silversea_starsong - and perhaps other people too - and is not problematic when used as they use it. For an active user who reacts and updates identifications based on others’ input, this isn’t a problem (although it would become one if that user suddenly died or was incapacitated). The problem with opting-out globally is that many people do it without understanding what it means.
My suggestion would be similar to that for setting up projects: before you can opt-out globally from Community ID, you need to spend a bit of time on iNaturalist and understand how it works. So make this a feature that can only be unlocked once you’ve reached a certain number of observations. It would be greyed-out before then. That way, the only people likely to activate the option would be those who know what they’re doing.
Here’s one more reason to not opt out globally, BJ Stacey passed away and all of his observations are opted out, and staff isn’t going to do anything with it, 26k of “needs id” observations practically worthless, most being stuck at high id. So, unless you’re going to live forever, think about what will be left after you.
You can still put IDs on these observations, and you can still look up observations by those IDs—it’s just not the user-friendly route: https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications
Well, I’m assuming that people will want to see an observation labelled by the most precise and accurate ID available, and that when one of the IDs is theirs, they will generally believe that their ID fulfills that criterion.
In principle, of course, the ID I believe to be the most precise and accurate available could be the observer’s, or mine, or that of another person, or the community ID.
I don’t assume anything in this case, I just wrote a real example of how those observations look.
You gave an example where the most frequent ID was the most precise and accurate ID. Sometimes this will be the case, sometimes it won’t. In order to figure out how we want the system to act, we need to consider the range of possibilities rather than a single scenario.
Do we always want to see the community ID? For me, the answer is definitely “no”. I suspect that most people on iNaturalist actually share this opinion, though I don’t know. I think this agreement is likely to be concealed by presenting the situation as “community ID vs. opting out”. That presentation both creates a community vs. individual conflict, and may not capture what would actually be best for anyone involved.
In majority of cases observers id is either wrong or too broad, because button to decline community id is presented when you set up the account. There’s little justification to use “opt out all” function, somehow it’s there while in the topic on how to change it on every observation, staff said it’s against iNat reasoning and if you don’t want community to participate, why use iNat at all, I couldn’t find the topic as I don’t remember the name, but found 30+ topics on how opt out makes life harder for everyone, messes the maps and questions whether observations like that are included in the cv. I absolutely doubt most people on iNat would agree that the way to deal with incorrect community id is to opt out it entirely on your profile.