Some people were skeptical as to my reasoning that opt-out was useful for cases where too many users made uninformed IDs. No, it’s not because I’m being “stubborn” and should accept community ID in all cases. Here are two examples of uninformed ID chains (I have many):
(they chose this because it has the common name of “velvet mite” when there’s hundreds of them)
I do appreciate that these cases are rare in the long run and for most users, but they are common enough for me that they fulfill one of my criteria for deciding to opt-out overall.
One can still opt out on individual case basis if needes… but actually I have yet to run into a case where it is not possible to solve it with commenting and if needed tagging of knowledgeable people…(e.g. this recent one looked like a lost case… but it was doable)
But as has been said before… the biggest issue is with it beeing intransparent for IDers… if I go through observations on the IDer tab (which I do use more now then when I commented last time), then I think it is not shown anywhere actually? Why not make it prominent? Case solved… everybody is happy
I’ve decided that the next time I run into Opted Out observations, I’ll comment to the effect that this observer has opted out, because I think other identifiers will see the comment more easily than the current way.
I have one in which I, the observer, explain exactly why I (temporarily) opted out: after my initial misidentification, which was seconded, a third ID and the ensuing discussion persuaded me that I was wrong, and I changed my ID to agree with the third one. This left the observation stuck at “Dicots,” because the ID that originally agreed with mine was in a different family. I opted out so that my new, corrected ID would show instead, in hopes of getting another corroboration. Once I do, I will opt back in.
I hope that people don’t just see the words “opting out” and decide to ignore the observation, because that would defeat the purpose of why I did so.
Help me understand – why not just tag some identifiers who specialize in the third identification with which you now agree? Eventually would not the community process work to correctly identify your observation? Which would leave the second identification (the one with which you no longer agree) as a Maverick, right?
Something like that has happened to me before, here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/88702674 but I was able to utilize community knowledge even though the original identifier (extremely knowledgeable and also very busy, likely never saw any notifications) did not return.
To be clear, do you think any tagging qualifies as “bothering people”? Or do you mean you have you been conditioned to be self-reliant?
Because while I do not think every observation warrants tagging identifiers, if you think there is a question of identification and you are polite in how you approach someone, I see no bother in tagging someone.
They are not beholden to offer an identification but can choose to ignore the tag, politely comment demurring to offer an identification, or even tag someone they consider to have better knowledge. I have seen all three.
If you mean you are self-reliant, that is noble, I just am unclear if under the circumstances you described that approach is as effective at achieving identification on a community-based application.
I wish the observation maps for a taxon would omit observations that have opted out of a community taxon that differs from the user’s ID. There are a few taxa that I know well and I try to keep curated, and it gets obnoxious when the default range map is permanently misleading due to (sometimes inactive) users’ misidentified out-of-range observations that have opted out of the community taxon.
Like, if I post a picture of a chicken labeled “willow flycatcher” a thousand miles out of range and opt out of community ID, is there any way other users can collectively make my nonsense observation stop showing up on the default willow flycatcher range map? Or will it just always be there unless someone filters to “research grade” observations only? It seems like there should be a way to prevent a single user from forcing an observation onto the default map even when everyone else disagrees with their ID.
Yes, that’s why also a small number of users/observations can have an unproportionally large negative impact, including the mood of other users/IDers - the figurative obnoxious mosquito in the bedroom…
What you could do is help getting the observation to ‘casual grade’ - either by going to the DQA and marking it ‘as good as it can be’, or by aquiring enough disagreeing IDers.
As others echo, I think we all agree that opting out for individual cases like the ones you note is valid, but I have yet to see a reason why someone would do it for ALL their observations. I think it should be an option for users, but a “harder to find” one so new users don’t default to it.
If you mark “as good as it can be” on that opted out observation, it will go to casual and disappear from range maps. If needed it would always good to have at least two people mark this “good as it can be” as the observer else cannjust countervote and the observation would be “need ID” again
The specific messages I got were to the contrary, about there not being any valid cases at all. But I appreciate that isn’t the majority opinion and agreement.
Just as an FYI, any ID that includes a comment in the text box (including agreeing IDs) will generate a notification, even if you have disabled notifications for agreeing IDs in your account.
Different people want to see and interact with different sets of observations in different ways. That’s a good thing.
When one person’s way of working with iNaturalist is inconveniencing you, it’s probably not that they’re doing it wrong and you need to figure out how to control their behavior, it’s that we don’t have a good structure to minimize that friction—instead of accommodating different preferences, the system puts users into conflict. We can’t both get the interface we want, so one of us wins, the other loses. That’s the problem with opting out.
Yup. I’m reacting mostly to the more recent comments, which seem to be have reverted to the “there’s no legitimate reason to want to opt out except on individual observations in rare circumstances” viewpoint.
An observations with now (including mine) 4 disagreeing IDs… wondered why it did not change and opened the observation in a separate tab to see it is opted out (is this really the only way to see it?)…
The observation ist 6 years old, disagreeing IDs came in in the year of upload, one year ago, 5 months ago and now… nothing happened.
The observer is very active (even a curator), has 50.000 IDs and a loooong paragraph on why opted out, e.g. so every disagreement can be checked… yah well, seems to work pretty well sigh
…ran into another of this observers observations with disagreements and hanging there since years just some minutes later.
I really still don´t get the general opting out when you then cannot (or want not) keep up with them. Put it to casual now and hope it stay that way
- the figurative obnoxious mosquito in the bedroom… 