As far as I know this should also happen if you use an observation field that allows a taxon (rather than text) as a value.
I love this response! It is so fun seeing people ID things for me from 6+ mos ago and it takes me back to that bird walk or that time I spent out in nature. It’s lovely to reminisce!
Ancestor disagreements are particularly problematic, but I was referring to the situation even with an ordinary supporting ID beyond Research Grade. Someone in 10 years might try to challenge the ID of an observation, IDing it as a species that isn’t currently known to exist. When I add an unnecessary extra ID, the main function is to indefinitely block such challenges. I am effectively saying “I disagree with you, person 10 years in the future, I don’t think this is the species that hasn’t even been discovered yet, and I think the current ID should be locked in place regardless of future evidence.”
Of course we all intend to review and update our IDs as necessary, but most people have no idea how long they’ll actually be doing that. I certainly can’t promise that I’ll still be doing this in 10 - 20 years, so I try to make sure I won’t be an obstacle for anyone else if/when I ever stop IDing. The first two IDs also disagree with future challenges, but they are necessary to reach research grade, and they don’t block a future challenge from even being reviewed (because a later disagreeing ID will cause the observation to go back to “needs ID” if there are only 2 IDs, but not if there are 3+). Since extra IDs are unnecessary, their primary purpose is to impede future changes.
Edit: The auto-withdrawing ID idea is for an ID that lets you say “I agree with the current ID, but if someone challenges it, my ID will be automatically withdrawn after a certain period of time unless I come back to review and re-affirm it”. You wouldn’t want all IDs to behave this way, but it would be good for “extra” IDs.
Why a 4th ID though? The problem of people deleting their accounts surely can’t be so common that there are a large number of observations where two IDers both vanish. Also, if someone does delete their account, the Research Grade observations they IDed should just go back to “Needs ID” without a change in the leading ID. That means they should be relatively easy to find (because they are still in the appropriate taxon), and a single IDer can go through and bring them back to Research Grade. That’s not the case when disagreeing IDs are required to reach 2/3s consensus, which requires multiple IDers to fix and keeps things stuck either in the wrong ID or at a higher level. Basically, I think the “cure” (extra supporting IDs) seems worse than the “disease” (vanishing IDs from deleted accounts), and the disease seems quite rare.
It has also not been my experience that IDers are responsive to comments, and it can feel aggressive/rude to tag all of the earlier IDers each time I add a maverick ID to something that needs to be changed/corrected (maybe my perception of the etiquette here is off). In situations where there are 3+ IDs, it has been generally uncommon that all of the IDers come back to update their IDs. I also think we should strive to ensure that we aren’t creating unnecessary problems for the future, as none of us will be around forever to review/change our IDs, and I suspect that few people can say with certainty that they will still be doing this in 10 years. I don’t want my IDs to become an obstruction and frustration for future IDers if I ever stop using the site.
Part of me understands the frustration of seeing certain observations get a lot of IDs vs. others getting almost no attention…..but the problem isn’t the other observations getting attention. It’s the unequal distribution of identifiers across the world. If only every observation had the benefit of five or six people looking at it. I’m lucky if some of mine even get to RG!
I’m based in Vietnam and plants rarely ever get identified, and often when they do it’s via the CV and can be half a world off as the CV isn’t trained well on plants in the region.
Lots of observations languish in Vietnam though, not just plants.
Here are the countries which need identifiers, and part of the reason why I ID for Africa - filtering to accounts created in the last week. And I still have a batch from CNC25 to clear
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/low-growth-countries-and-territories
Thanks for this link! I went and took a look. But correct me if I’m wrong, it feels like this isn’t a problem with people over-identifying RG observations, but a problem with the number of people on iNat who know these regions well enough to identify. I’d love someone to tell me, “This plant needs more IDers, and this is how you identify them.”
I’ve been looking through raptor observations, some of them quite old. I find it a great way to learn a bit more while also contributing to the curation of this database. Sometimes, when I add a maverick ID I don’t receive any follow-up reactions from the previous IDers, including some very prolific ones, and I admit that can be frustrating.
While I try to stay aware that the observation might be old or that some previous IDers may have “retired” from the platform, there’s also the possibility that they’re simply unaware of the option to silence agreeing notifications and end up receiving an overwhelming number of alerts. They may not want to spend precious time going through them and might prefer to use that time looking for observations that actually need identification. After a while it occurred to me that I might be part of the problem with all the agreeing IDs, so nowadays I try to agree only on species that I particularly enjoy identifying or on observations with few agreements.
Another point I’d like to make is that there’s nothing wrong, in my opinion, with wanting to reach the top of a leaderboard. And the only way to do that is often by identifying observations that might seem unnecessary.
To sum it up, the fact that some obscure insect observations in Papua New Guinea are desperately in need of identification doesn’t conflict with someone wanting to be the top IDer of a common and easy to ID insect in Europe. It simply means there’s a shortage of knowledgeable IDers for those insects in that particular region, but that is another completely different problem.
So, those are my two cents on the matter.
Try this project - but you will have to work at finding a taxon that interests you, and a useful ID tip.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/observations-with-id-tips
I tend to use the ID tip when I come across it while IDing - to work thru the relevant slice of obs - now I can tell A and B apart. For example Southern sp, South of the Fish Hoek gap
Or a more erudite discussion https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/10960302
Another option - if you know how to ID a plant - is to check whether it is Included or Pending for CV. If Pending, we need about 60 obs.
Same but for me its the charadriiformes or birds in my country in general
Sometimes working to move an observation to a lower taxon rank is helpful by itself, bc suddenly a taxon expert will pop in and ID to genus or species.
I agree with what many others have said here. There is another option, you can unfollow an observation when you are tired of the notifications. Please be kind and consider all aspects of a situation before assuming the worst.
Yes I hear you!! Though I was super happy to see that one of the most beautiful and iconic (and threatened) orchids of China, Cymbidium sinense, just got added to the CV in the latest update.
Nice.
In my area the main Cymbidium is the Aloe-leaved Cymbidium (Cymbidium aloifolium). A while back I rescued a few clusters that poachers had thrown out after not being able to sell them to tourists. After a little bit of work and time they’ve grown massively and flower every year.
Put them on several trees outside where I live in the local national park.
Like many others, I don’t agree with your view. You have control over what notifications you receive and what observations you (un)follow, so you already have all the tools at yout fingertips for this not to be a burden to you at all.
I get that it’s not really what iNat is about when somebody methodically goes through all 17,000 research-grade observations of lions agreeing with them just to boost their own stats, but there are plenty of genuinely good reasons to give a third (or fourth or fifth) confirming ID, including doing so years after an observation was posted.
I spend a lot of time searching through ‘old’ obs on iNat for various purposes, and will add my ID where I feel it is useful. In fact, I wish more people would look at my older obs. All observations are equally valid and useful data regardless of when they were posted, and not everyone is on iNat to work through IDing the needs-ID obs.
The key phrase in @sedgequeen’s comment is “that you can actually identify yourself”. The emphasis shouldn’t be on avoiding adding third or fourth observations but getting people only to agree when they are sure themselves. If five identifiers are genuinely independently convinced that an observation is species X then it is supposed to be difficult for a maverick to come along and disagree in a way that changes the consensus ID.
When an observation with multiple IDs turns out to be incorrect, it is not always because they were made by people who lacked knowledge or skill in the taxon in question.
Sometimes it happens that multiple experienced IDers will misinterpret a tricky picture or see what they expect to see rather than the outlier. Or where multiple people are working with a species concept that is later revised and cannot be corrected by taxon swap, or turns out to be based on a mistake in the literature, or knowledge about distribution changes and additional species need to be considered.
It is not unusual for such cases to be discovered months or years later, when some percentage of the IDers are no longer active or happen to miss the notification, even with repeated @ mentioning. And since these wrong IDs were typically entered by the main experts of the taxon in question, it becomes a challenge to get enough people to withdraw or find additional skilled IDers to override not one wrong ID, but multiple ones.
To be sure, this situation is not necessarily common, but neither is it so uncommon as to be irrelevant for decisions one might make about the advisability of adding more IDs than needed to get the observation to RG. I personally prefer economy of IDs, as it makes it easier to change the community taxon if something changes. This is not to say that I never add “superfluous” IDs, but I generally consider that the potential problems that could result from doing this are greater than the potential advantages.
Yes absolutely!! I once saw five identifiers ID what turned out to be a raven with a bit of food in their mouth as a California Condor, at least a couple of whom were extremely experienced birders. Luckily enough of the original identifiers were still active and switched their IDs thanks to an extremely convincing explanation.
If you don’t add a third confirming ID and someone deletes their account, it now needs one more ID to get back to RG, which is a little annoying, but if you do add your third ID and it ends up being wrong now potentially seven correct IDs must be added to get the ID back to RG, which is a nightmare. A fourth or fifth ID on the other hand make the numbers even worse while only hedging against multiple IDers deleting their accounts.
You just perfectly expressed my view on this. I ID in a group where the taxonomy has undergone rapid change and continues to do so, and this situation seems to be quite common in fungi more broadly. Even the best IDers can only make IDs based on the totality of evidence and information that is available today. IDs are not future-proof. I have corrected IDs from 10 years ago knowing I would have made the exact same ID they did at the time they made it; theirs was not a “bad” ID that could have been avoided based upon knowledge at the time.
I think the differences in viewpoint on this may partially be the result of differing ID specialties. If one primarily IDs taxa in relatively stable groups where the taxonomy is firmly established and unchanging, this might seem like nit-picking or focusing too much on exceptional circumstances. Those who specialize in groups where new species are still being discovered rapidly and taxonomy is dynamic, we frequently frequently have to clean up after past changes, and naturally wonder how our own IDs will age, hoping to reduce any burden on future IDers. Our views are inevitably informed/shaped by these differences in context. ID-trains are likely to be more problematic for some taxa than others.