So, the question is open: do we ask this feature, how many people here will vote to support it, are we going to get it realized?
Something along these lines has been on my mental list to propose for a while. From prior experience I’m expecting it to just get shot down without even being posted in the “feature request” subforum, though. Perhaps I’m too pessimistic.
Oh, I see! Especially now that I’ve read the rest of the comments after the one I replied to. I can’t say as I’ve ever had trouble tracking down an observation I’ve IDed as Taxon A that the community then IDed as Taxon B (but I’ve only posted a little over 35,000 observations in a little over four years, and most of those are very, very common and easy to ID).
But everyone’s work flow is different. I come home from a hike and try very hard to post my observations with an ID the same day - but I can certainly understand how some people might not get around to posting observations until after the field season. Or people might post observations without a species-level ID because they need to borrow the right key from their colleague, or check the specimen with a dissecting scope, or try their best to understand what the taxonomists have been up to recently - or maybe they have very busy lives and just don’t have the time.
For all of those reasons, and more, I think the opt-out option is fine. I don’t even mind if an observer opts out for all of their observations. As an identifier, it’s mildly annoying to not notice the observer has opted out until I’ve added an ID and noticed the taxon doesn’t change accordingly, but then I get mildly annoyed by observers who post without any ID, or post houseplants without marking them as Not Wild, or post 17 consecutive photos of what is obviously the same bird as 17 separate observations, and so on. When my patience runs out for such things, I go look at the wonderful observations posted on the standard Explore page worldwide, 95% of which have a perfectly good initial ID, are of wild organisms, and include all relevant photos in one observation.
Opt-out for just those observations, just until you get back to them.
I can think of a case where I wouldn’t. If I were to identify Taraxacum officinale, that is a valid species-level taxon in the taxonomic concept I am using. If someone who is using the microspecies concept bumps it back to Section Taraxacum because they don’t know which microspecies it is, I don’t consider that an improvement.
But in this example, it wouldn’t be a blanket opt-out; it would be just that particular observation; and if someone called me on it, I would explain my reason. If, perchance, they go ahead and ID the specific microspecies, I might even opt back in.
Or remember which date those observations are from, I doubt most people have any problem with that, or save the original file separately (leave it in a folder for newly edited photos) to see the date. Or just check the ids, if somebody ids that observation, you will get the notification. There’s no way to lose an observation!
That’s one of the possible courses of action, certainly. My intent was to provide more examples of why one might want to interact with something other than the community ID, rather than to work out the best way of approaching each particular case. I doubt there is a single best solution across users, in any case.
Personally, sometimes I won’t really have any need to interact with an observation after identifying it, sometimes I will. In the first case, of course, I’m happy to let the community ID work itself out, or not, at whatever pace it will. When I have other downstream interactions with the observations that depend on the name attached to them, though, iNaturalist’s limitations on how we can interact with identifications become inconvenient. About a week ago, I created a custom observation field and added values for a couple hundred observations because that was the path of least resistance to get an export file that included my ID. Not the end of the world, but kind of a pointless little headache when all the data is already in iNaturalist, just hard to get at otherwise.
It depends. I miss things if I’m out in the field for a bit, or the notification pops up but I don’t have time to look at it then, etc. Part of the context is that I have external datasets that are linked to iNaturalist observations. When the ID changes on iNaturalist, propagating that back to my other data as needed is part of the process. While I assume that makes me pretty unusual at present, that’s something I’d be thrilled to see change over time. Various different entities have been collecting ecological plot data with undocumented and unverifiable plant IDs for decades. iNaturalist is potentially a very good solution, but all the ID-related issues I’ve been stumbling over are likely to get a lot worse at scale.
You look a the observations in the project on the map in the Explore page.
You remove observations from the project (or, if too many, just delete the project).
Using it, you could figure out if it is really important or not, and if there are other situations where it is useful too.
The sofware could further filter the results obtained, for instance there could be an option in the settings file to keep only the ID with which you are in disagreement. With this option, in this case, the 1st observation would be ignored and the 2nd observation would be pushed to the “basket” project:
I’d suggest to add your observations to iNaturalist, and to include a brief explanation of why it is identified as what it is. If someone adds an incorrect ID, you can comment and ask politely why they think it’s B and not A. If the correct ID is not showing up as an option on iNaturalist, many people simply won’t be aware that it exists.
You’re under no obligation to fix any of these, but it can be quite satisfying to tip a bunch of incorrect observations back to genus level, with the right species ID and a copy-paste explanation, and then gradually watch as others absorb the new information and make them Research Grade with the correct ID. For example, there used to be a lot of observations of Cardamine hirsuta in the Western US misidentified as Cardamine oligosperma, which is actually not very common - but only the latter appeared in Jepson’s Flora at the time. Once we’d flipped a few dozen of them, people started to identify them correctly, and Cardamine hirsuta is now by far the most commonly-observed species, as it should be. So, if you felt like fixing some of the incorrect observations (best to focus on Research Grade ones) and tagging in a few others to help, the situation should start to improve quickly.
that is what Botaneek did for Anaxeton laeve and arborescens. Must have been daunting when he started. I picked it up when he commented on my wrong ones. Now I pay it forward and keep any new wrong ones in line. Distribution map neatly divided North and South of the Fish Hoek Gap.
You are under no obligation to do this, but there is some chance that an amateur with an interest in your taxa/geographic area would be willing to take this on if given appropriate education. Comments on observations by high volume user/IDers could also snowball in time.
Sometimes the observer seems to forget to formally agree with the ID.
In this example the observer removed his ID but left the observation as “Needs ID”, after commenting in favor of the new ID:
Probably just a case of forgetting (or not understanding) the consequences of opting out. A simple comment from one of the identifiers explaining how to get the observation to Research Grade (if they so desire) would probably solve such issues. For example,
FYI, since you are opted out of community ID, you will need to explicitly agree with the ID by adding your own matching ID (or opt back in to community ID) if you wish this observation to become Research Grade.
I think the sentiment is that the design is unnecessarily introducing work for identifiers, and that those simple comments build up quickly across the users that have all observations opted out.
The community volunteers their time on this platform, and iNat as an organization has lots of opportunity to tweak things to refine this tool that provides such valuable data.
Immense amounts of data is fabulous, but the true value probably come from the curation.
In the first case, append this filter to your search URL (not very useful by now, but may become more significant later, with more observations in the project):
I use the exclusion filter above when searching for observations candidates to be pushed to other projects (see here) for helping to indentify observations. For this purpose at least, this project is useful, now and in the future.
Update: replaced by another more complete project, and another filter, see below.
I’m not sure if formally agreeing with an ID is necessarily encouraged by Identification Etiquette on iNaturalist - Wiki since it makes it seem like observer’s agreement with community is just as good as specialists who ID it.
For some of my observations, like this bird, I still have my rough ID because I’m no birder so my agreement with community wouldn’t be genuine.
Granted, I treat some plants differently since that’s what I identify.
Thanks! I am unclear how this works. Are you adding observations one at a time to this project? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to be able to add opted-out users to the rules, so that all of their observations are included? Of course, some will have opted out of letting others add their observations to projects too…
