I have an issue with people who identify sightings “out of time”.
The sighting has been identified by a number of people and is research grade. The person comes along weeks, months or years later and identifies the post.
This is unnecessary and makes more work for previous identifiers and the person posting.
It appears to be an attempt to become the largest identifier of the species.
This is a lack of consideration.
Perhaps there should be a time limit or something preventing such an id counting towards identification numbers. If it is an id which disagrees and offers another id that should be allowed.
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People add IDs for observations that are already RG for any number of reasons. It generally is not because they are trying to put themselves at the top of the leaderboard.
Maybe they are reviewing all observations of the taxon and they find that adding IDs is the most efficient way to sort which ones they have looked at and which ones they haven’t.
Maybe they are looking at the observation for some other reason and think they might as well add an ID while they are there, because an extra ID doesn’t hurt, because sometimes people delete accounts and their IDs are lost, etc.
Maybe it is part of their learning process and they are currently more comfortable adding IDs to observations that have already been reviewed than adding the ID that makes an observation RG.
Maybe they enjoyed the observation and adding an ID is a way to express their appreciation and/or make sure they get notified of subsequent activity.
Maybe they just enjoy IDing.
Etc.
I admit that I find it slightly annoying when some observations get lots of “extra” IDs while there are countless others waiting for even a single person to look at them. This comes from my perspective as someone who mainly IDs a taxon where there are far too few skilled IDers and it is a challenge to figure out how to best distribute our efforts to cover as much as possible. So I do find myself sometimes wishing that people who add a lot of 3rd or 4th confirming IDs might consider directing their attention to more neglected taxa instead or prioritize non-RG observations before looking at RG ones.
But I remind myself that there is no guarantee that preventing people from adding additional agreeing IDs to RG observations would result in those IDs going to non-RG observations instead. It is quite possible that people would simply spend their time in other ways. We are all volunteers and most of us ID because we enjoy it; we are not required to focus our efforts on any particular set of observations and quite probably a lot of us would resent being told we had to do so.
If you dislike getting notifications for agreeing IDs for observations you have interacted with, you can change your notification settings to exclude this.
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Hi @Canbrou and welcome to the iNaturalist forum!
People add identifications for all sorts of reasons at all sorts of times—anything from a few seconds after the observation was uploaded to a decade or more later. This is true for observations that are already at RG and ones that are still in Needs ID. You can find many past threads about this in the forum,
Certainly, a few people adding IDs to RG observations may be motivated by a place on a leaderboard, but most probably have other motivations. In my case, I focus on particular genera and families, and I typically want to review and add my own IDs to observations, even if they’re already regarded as RG by iNat.
In general, I find it best to avoid assuming I know the motivations of other iNat users. If I find someone’s actions confusing it tends to be best to politely ask them for more details.
You also say:
This is unnecessary and makes more work for previous identifiers and the person posting.
What additional work are you thinking of here? I understand that people may get additional notifications, but I tend to find that burden pretty minimal.
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I want to see which identifiers agree with me - but I unfollow each obs when it no longer interests me. On social media, you cannot change the behaviour or other people - but you can change how you engage with that obs. Or if you are thinking of a particular individual, you can mute them - which is a useful option - no notifications but you can still see their contributions if someone else gives you a reason to look at that obs again.
Hope that notification management is on the iNat staff’s to do list.
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I love this thoughtful answer and list of reasons for adding what look like superfluous IDs. I never get tired of learning the different ways people interact with iNaturalist. While it’s a little annoying to see 48 notifications of someone re-identifying all my beach morning-glories or something, I’m intrigued to think beach morning-glories are somebody’s spark plant. And I enjoy the time-travel of being re-introduced to an observation I made years ago.
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I couldn’t disagree more! There are so many other things you could be annoyed about - yesterday I encountered a photo of a supermarket bunch of celery. What a waste of storage space! But I assume there was a reason for that person uploading it as a natural observation, and I can’t assume that it was wrong - I just don’t know.
Sometimes when I’m annotating, I come across an old observation where the original ID was wrong, but they don’t/won’t withdraw it, so I add an ID to show support for the later IDers.
Also, we’re not all fortunate enough to be knowledgeable about lesser-known species. I’d love to help with other species, but I’ve encountered a few experts who really don’t like it when you get something wrong! It’s nice to have the ability to add your tuppence to easier IDs!
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I think the main nuisance aspect of it is the notifications (and in my opinion it can be a rather large nuisance). Has anyone proposed a feature where all notifications of additional agreeing IDs to RG observations could be turned off? That would be the ultimate solution, I think, and completely avoid interfering with the various legitimate reasons people have outlined here for continuing to add agreeing ID.
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this feature already exists (but for all agreeing IDs, not just for RG)
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Ah thanks, that’s great! Yes, not 100% aligned with what I was proposing, but possibly close enough for some people’s use cases.
(Personally, I think I still want to know when someone backs up my maverick ID, or when I suggest an ID with low confidence and then someone else confirms it.)
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I couldn’t agree more with @spiphany and @rupertclayton !
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I’m not an avid identifier but a while ago I was super into hyenas so I tried to identify as many as I could to
a.) become better at identifying them and
b.) to review previously research grade observations
Sometimes, doing (b) can be very helpful as I’ve found a couple research grade observations that were incorrectly ID’ed and I then correctly ID’ed them. It’s not common but it does happen.
And while adding IDs to the research grade observations, I did get really high up on some leaderboards, but that wasn’t my goal. It just happened in the process.
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Personally, I like it when someone comes along and adds an ID to an already research grade observation of mine, even an old one.
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I perhaps should disclose that on at least one occasion I have expounded at considerable length about some of my frustrations connected with (among other things) experts spending their time adding additional IDs to RG observations of species that are generally ID’d correctly, in taxa where there are too few IDers.
So I am not unsympathetic to the concern voiced here, but I see it as less a case of the IDs themselves being problematic (they are not, in most cases, assuming they are made with knowledge), as it is about larger considerations of whether and how IDers coordinate their activities, the hurdles that iNat’s infrastructure poses to this, and whether one sees oneself as IDing only for one’s own personal ends or as part of a collective endeavor where the needs and desires of the larger community play a role in how one chooses to spend one’s time.
I think as an IDer it is worthwhile asking oneself some of these questions – but as the person getting notifications of such activities, any annoyance I might feel is ultimately my problem, not the fault of the IDer, so I try not to judge and try instead to assume that the IDer has good reasons for doing what they are doing.
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I missed this iNat update - thank you! I hope future changes include restricting notifications of confirming IDs to one’s own observations. I do hundreds of IDs of other’s posts, and of course don’t want my feed cluttered with notifications of agreements of those, but I want to know if someone confirms an unverified observation of mine, no matter how old it is.
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I disagree. I have zero issue if someone comes along much later and provides an ID, agreeing, disagreeing, etc.
In fact, I have enough old observations kicking around that if there was some sort of time limit on providing IDs then a lot of them would never get IDs.
In addition to what others have said about IDs in general, disagreeing IDs can also be for a variety of reasons; sometimes it is simply a new person making a mistake, other times it’s correcting an ID that was wrong and got confirmed because others piled on with that incorrect ID, other times there has been a change in nomenclature, or a split in species, etc, etc.
In my opinion it’s rarely, if ever, due to a lack of consideration.
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I am happy to get multiple ID on taxons (including disagreements), which are difficult to identify. Getting multiple agreeing IDs on common species, which are almost impossible to misclassify can be somewhat annoying, especially if they go back several years. As a result I sometimes think twice before including an observation of a common species, unless the context of the observation makes it unusual.
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When I am identifying, the standard settings are that I only see observations which have not reached RG. But for the European reed beetles, in which I have a particular interest, I periodically look at the ones which have reached RG without my help because there will be a few which I consider have been misidentified. And while I am looking for those, I don’t see any harm in adding an agreement to some of the ones that I do agree with, especially those which reached RG by 3 to 1 or if it is a contentious species.
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I’m one of the people who goes through all the observations of a certain taxa and puts IDs on them. Currently I’m reviewing the family Armadillidiidae, and I think it is very useful for many people to look at an observation and put their ID on it even if there are quite a few already.
Firstly it establishes a consensus within the ID’ers community here and provides an opportunity to discuss what features lead to that ID.
Secondly if someone else comes along and puts a different ID then we will be notified and can discuss what is correct, or go back to genus if there is no consensus.
I find quite a lot of older observations just have the 2 IDs needed for research grade and haven’t been reviewed by any experts, which is somewhat troubling if they are then passed on to the GBIF or used by scientists. Sometimes these IDs will be incorrect and this affects the validity of iNat data as a whole and impacts public perception. Ultimately, if we are putting out bad data then there is not much point in doing this.
So, I am happy to see as many IDs on observations as possible with good communication between ID’ers and effort towards ensuring maximum accuracy. I think this greatly outweighs the impact of some extra notifications, though I understand it can be annoying when there are a lot.
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This seems to have turned in to hot discussion but here are my thoughts -
I do this several time and there are 2-3 major reasons -
1: (which is the most common) When I find another observation of a rare species then I often agree with other obs to get the leaderboard as I know how to identify the species.
2: I identify another member of the same genus (especially when the genus is rare) and then there are one or more observations of it, then I do so for leaderboards’ sake.
3: I ID some of them just because I want, perhaps because there is interesting variation.
I must note that this has been exploited and times and many people have taken leaderboards of the Family Fulgoridae by just id’ing Spotted Lanternflies, taking advantage of the agree buttons on Identify page lol.
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I added another “Like” to your post even though it already had 40+ Likes and probably didn’t need anymore. ;-)
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