When you attribute such motive to IDers, you do damage to the community. Are there other possible explanations for these IDs?
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Yes that is the curator in brackets bit. Some mavericks are MEANT to be there.
There is a proud maverick thread somewhere in the forum.
@peakaytea lots of taxon specialists who look at all their Chosen taxon
Which most of us appreciate.
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When I open iNat on my laptop, I always open to the Maverick search page.
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I’m disappointed that a thread set up to celebrate those making IDd has again degenerated into a critique of the value and motivation of those IDs.
Last year Istarted withdrawing or deleting my leading IDs that had become superfluous, in an effort to counter the narrative that I was “doing it for the points.”
This week, I realized that changing my workflow to avoid that unwarranted criticism was as silly as changing my workflow to increase my numbers.
I don’t look at the points boards, and I would be pleased to have a button to opt out of having my name published there. It mostly causes me aggravation and insult.
I do the thing for the pleasure, the education, and the community of teaching and learning. I like being a part of the team that gets things to RG.
That said, I do appreciate the shoutout from @lotteryd , who has been so instrumental in my education on iNat and the natural world. Thanks for all of it! X x o o
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When I got serious about making IDs a couple of years ago, I started filtering New England plant Needs IDs by species or genus. There were LOTS of observations several years old that needed someone to say, yes, that is indeed Very Common Species X. Or someone to chime in to overcome an observer’s maverick ID. I was surprised, because there are many very active botanist-identifiers here in New England. But maybe not enough such people?
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Have I told you I so admire the incredible amount of identification work you do?
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I take it you don’t spend much time on the forum. Everything topic ends up off track after enough replies. I wouldn’t worry too much what others think, rather keep doing what you’re doing if you enjoy it.
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Well, you have. Lol. And I you. Im looking forward to another marathon.
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Don’t let other people tell you how to iNat. We each have our own different way, works for me. Thanks to the forum we can begin to understand, why others do it differently. Why they care about that. Maybe we change something because we can see a good reason.
Grumble grumble top of the leaderboard is not a reason. Let alone a good one!
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Same. Reading posts here in the forum shows, it is often frowned upon, but I will admit as I have somewhere else before: I am the same.
I learned a while ago that peoples brains are wired quite differently. Especially the dopamine cascade works very differently in different people. And for some it is easy to get a push by the stupidest things (that is why such games like Candy crash have so many gamers, but for some others it does just nothing… it plays with this cascade and if it works, it works). I am one of those people. I love seeing things getting finished. Setting filters for needs ID and working through those pages, seeing page number decline and finally seeing the last one done? - Amazing to watch. Seeing my own number on IDs for others going up, reaching certain checkpoints? - very satisfying. And yes, same goes for those leader boards… I find them stimulating, motivating me to do more.
Is it stupid? Yeah, probably. But it works for me and I am sure I and @neylon are not the only ones for whom it works. Taking that away would hurt the community much more then the few people that get such a hard kick out of it that they misuse it in the end.
As long as the IDs are well-ment and done to the best of their knowledge, nobody is hurt by the 5th or 6th confirming ID. And if some power IDers in e.g. birds (as they have been mentioned as having some of those) are regularly wrong, they will also in most cases be corrected as there are apparently so many active and knowledgeable IDers.
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Yeah, this! It depends so much on your workflow and what you do.
I just checked the 10 most active spider-IDers I ran into on iNat. Often the experts for their regions. One of them has a leading score of 25%… most others are well below 20%, averaging somewhere around 15% I would say. None of those has less then 45% supporting IDs (Its between 45% and 65%).
Those number as a general output do not tell you too much about the IDers.
I would trust each and every one of those IDers opinions (which does not mean that every ID is correct, we constantly also correct each other as mistakes happen, and if you do more IDs you also accumulate more mistakes of course)
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Aha, I had wondered why you did that. I agree that it’s unnecessary; you (and @lotteryd) do a great service with your high-level IDs, an example I strive to match.
In the spirit of things, here are some of my favorite/go-to identifiers who haven’t yet been mentioned (off the top of my head, so I apologize if I forgot anyone):
- @mpintar: expert on aquatic insects; bonus points for always annotating “Evidence of Presence” and “Life Stage”.
- @szucsich: myriapods and other fun stuff like forcepstails
- @grigorenko: caddisflies and other less common(ly identified) winged insects
- @alice_abela: knows everything about California orthopterans (and also takes fantastic macro shots)
- @edanko, @zdanko, @trinaroberts: flies, in particular hover flies
- @susanna_h, @matthias22: hymenopterans
- @thomaseverest: I think he’s IDed every California bivalve I’ve ever posted
- @david99: always helpful with Los Angeles birds
Thanks to them and all the other identifiers for their invaluable contributions.
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I love tidying up little messes, like Unknowns for a certain area on a certain date. I don’t care at all about being on a leaderboard, but put me in a City Nature Challenge and my competitive streak comes out. I do care about watching my own numbers of observations and IDs go up, but not about the number of species I’ve observed. We’re all weird in our own interesting ways.
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We seriously need to get some folks apprenticed to back up mpintar and norose! The leaderboard drops off extremely rapidly for aquatic insects. For example, here’s Notonectoidea:
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@grigorenko is an expert of caddisflies and Neuropterida, that’s a shorter version.)
Yes. I started a fresh challenge today 
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And straight-up altruism ftw! Biologists, that’s like a survival advantage in some contexts, right? It’s fun too. Identifiers are all in the same iNat parade- experts are in the spectacular part, while some are holding down the back end. Numbers for all just go up as a result.
also, re high-volume tip trading I mentioned above:
Lots of my Lepidoptera pile → butterfly labels lately are done with the above left side.
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As someone who mainly looks at Unknowns, here are my stats:
Leading 56.2%
Improving 33.2%
Supporting 10.5%
I’m not an expert at anything, most of my IDs are general. I just hope that getting things out of Unknown will help them get a real ID.
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A MOST WONDERFUL Achievement INDEED!!! Congrats to @aguilita !!!
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Mavericks are not necessarily incorrect. Sometimes the maverick ID is the only correct ID. I can think of an ID of mine, which subsequently got two species-level disagreements. I came back – didn’t change my ID – and commented, “I explained why it isn’t; still waiting for one of these guys to explain why it is.”
Me, too. A million identifications is something to aim for. I’m at 34,792, so I’ve got a long way to go yet. And I don’t plan to get there by choosing “low-hanging fruit” to agree with.
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