No respect whatsoever for racking up huge ID numbers…: if anything, a red flag for gamers. Do the statistics, and count how many per day, rain or shine, had to be identified in a certain time period.
…haven’t looked into the background of whether these million IDs are to be trusted…: their expertise? Are they in certain taxonomic areas, locales? A basic tenet of research, it’s not the quantity but the quality. We don’t award truth by popular vote. (Eppur si muove.)
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30 sec per ID? Indeed, whoops.
I am not sure whether I understand your comment right… I think 30 seconds is a lot… I do the easy IDs much faster… maybe 5 seconds.
I would be careful judging others achievements from your own experience (how long does a valuebale ID take, what do I Id vs. what others ID, how much time do I spend per day on that instead on e.g. a dog or TV etc…)
To each their own… but if everybody would be on the site of IDing 900 highest-quality observations in 4 years, this site would just not work out… there would be a lot of disappointment.
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Yep, I tend to agree, 30 seconds is plenty of time, at least for most of the critters I ID. It usually takes longer for the iNat UI to refresh than it does to identify the critter. There are always exceptions but maybe I’m just picking the low hanging fruit…ermmm… Araneomorphae 
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If everybody did a little bit, iNat wouldn’t have problems with the needs id pool, imagine taking 400k of ids and moving them to the needs id instead of RG, if there’s knowledge to check RG, there’s one to use in needs id.
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Not necessarily. I did a lot of needs ID pages for e.g. Argiope in North America and Pisauridae + Oxyopidae in Europe… those were 1000s of observations. However, right now there is not much coming in for these groups, so I would have plenty of time to go through RG observations on those as well (… if, yeah if I would not have the interest to expand… and one cannot assume that everyone all the time has). So if I want to keep up with my amount of IDing, but have already done the needs ID for my taxa… why should I be forced into doing the difficult stuff if I do not want to?
Just let people do what they do. I really do not see the harm there. If you would like subtract half of the IDs done by the power IDers because you do not value the 3rd ID as much… there are still more valuable IDs left then most other users of iNat do.
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Maybe because those observations worth time spent on iding them, not only the easiest of all, after all, that’s what experts’ job is, to know more and use the knowledge.
Regarding gamification, snobbery, and ID quality, a simple solution would be to allow more ways of estimating contributions (e.g., species-level vs. genus-level vs. family-level; rare, common, extremely common species) then let those who care, care and those who don’t, don’t. In effect, let people make their own leaderboards.
Personally, I like to see my name go up in the leader-board and get some motivation out of it. But, I think my protocol keeps me from getting too high. I specifically only mark observations I’ve IDed as reviewed if I’ve added a species-level ID (well, unless I consider it impossible to ID further based on photo quality, something I rarely do). This means that I rarely make higher-level IDs except as a preliminary sorting mechanism to make species-level IDs. It doesn’t mean I won’t make higher-level IDs, but simply means that the data I want at the end is easier to manage if I only or primarily add species-level IDs. I also add IDs to a lot of obscure species that few people know how to ID. Getting an idea of who else is in “my class” to see who I’m running against would give me some extra motivation to catch up with the big guns. :-) Honestly, it would be nice for seeing who “my peers” are too. Not everyone IDs like me and I have absolutely no problem with that. I don’t consider them any lesser for it and consider it just a different style of IDing potentially indicating a slightly different motivation for using iNaturalist. But seeing who does ID like me could help with collaborations and encourage me to get to the top of my leaderboard.
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But who says that everybody wants to be an expert? Maybe some people just have fun IDing… the stuff they already know. Not everyone has the same preferences and that ist fine… after all, it´s not a job, it´s what people spend their freetime on.
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Amen! I like to help observers by adding IDs. Good to know I’m being judged for insufficiently pure motives. Also good that I don’t care 
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I don’t understand any of the comments in reply to mine. Some ID’s were quicker, but I always write out why, so it does take a bit for things to load, get the right ID to pop up, click it, and then make a comment. I would say the fastest IDs I did were 30 seconds as I do have a copy/paste notepad open for the stuff I repeat a lot. But that still takes time to grab the right one and paste it in and do any edits for that particular person/scenario.
Some things took longer (pulling out ID books and crosschecking things, some ID’s I probably spent a good 20 minutes on a few for folk I knew who asked for help).
Basically, I thought 30 seconds was probably on the fast side, but I was erring on side of fast out of curiosity to calculate, and shocked that it was still over 100 hours. And it didn’t take into account all that I clicked past in 5-10 seconds not able to move it further, but if I had clicked to add another "dicot’ or whatever, then I would be getting up towards 1 million ID’s so maybe it’s a shame I didn’t bother? Who knows, just wasn’t how I was working them.
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If you’re on top of leaderboard you can’t be nobody, your name is already there and people will ask you, if you’re just having fun, make leaderboard not show people like that. Plus I’ve read multiple times those iders are experts, so they must be seen as such, proving my point.
Let´s just agree to disagree… I am not on the same page.
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I’ve done both spam agree and spent hours (sometimes full days) on single identifications and consider neither superior. It’s good to have fun when contributing and to be serious. I’d say allow multiple leaderboards and have people choose or feature which is more useful to them. If one turns out to be more reliable for getting people in contact with experts, then we can propose a feature request to change which one is more commonly displayed.
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Sorry, I think there is a missunderstanding. I am totally fine with your comment. I am not sure wether I understood the actuall reply to your comment… did @krisAtkinsonf think your 30 seconds where too fast and was judgmental about it? I don´t actually know, but that is how I read that comment of her. I just wanted to state, that good IDs can be done much faster even…
That was not to say that it is bad to spend some time on an ID! So please just keep doing what you do! :-)
BTW. I am on leaderboards of the above mentioned taxa. Doesn´t change that there are almost no new observations coming in now of those. So still same situation I explained above and I do not see your point proven at all. Maybe I am really good in IDing Argiope spiders… but that is all I do and want to do. Why would anyone expect me to work myself into another taxa, just because they don´t like me giving my ID to RG observations. I really don´t understand how one would expect that at all.
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ha fair, yeah the whole thread off of my post there confused me so I figured I’d clarify
I just did some more IDing, a few were easy 5 seconds agree because it was right, and one was a few minutes as I sussed out their photographs. It’s all over the place for me xD
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But we’re not discussing you here? You chose to take it personally, but the post is about worldwide top users, they didn’t id all the needs id first to then go through RG, so at least for me their way of iding is totally different from yours.
Red flag for gamers?
Alan Horstman: 1.2 million ID’s
Previous Chairman of the Indigenous Bulb Society of South Africa. Member of Bot Soc and SA Succulent Society.
Roberto R. Calderón: 1 million ID’s
One of the site curators
John Ascher: 1 million ID’s
Assistant Professor at National University of Singapore and Research Associate at Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum and the American Museum of Natural History.
Max Allen: 600K ID’s
carnivore ecologist, faculty at the University of Illinois and Illinois Natural History Survey, and curator of the INHS and UICU mammal collections.
Keep running down the list, you’ll see more like that.
It sounds like you made an opinion about something that you have done no research on.
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Well, you might as well automatically distrust mine, then, since I spend most of every evening doing IDs once I finish with the forums, and my eclectic interests encompass many taxonomic and geographic areas.
Moving things out of broad categories like “plants” or “animals” into, say, families is more of a job for generalists than specialists. And considering that we see specialists complain about things not yet being identified to family, I would say that the generalists are doing something important.
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No, I do not make it personal. I take myself as one example I can easily use without offending anyone (and even that not actually, as how I explained, I am moving on to the next taxa after I am done with one… but one really should not expect that from everyone). One of many with many different intentions and aims in their IDing which I think should be respected. It is soooo weird to me to complain that “you are not putting your ID where I wann to see it”… I hardly can understand that angle
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