URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:
Description of need:
Sometimes a user will discover that they have made a bunch of IDs that they no longer feel they can back up – for example, because their knowledge about the taxon has changed or a taxonomic split means that their IDs may create an unintended conflict and they don’t feel they can assess what the correct ID should be (e.g., see comments here). In at least one case, the lack of an easy way to remove one’s IDs in a particular region as a result of interpersonal conflicts led to the user deleting their account entirely (see here).
I realize that the idea of adding a way for people to more easily remove IDs will probably not be popular with forum users, but please hear me out. I have been insistent about the need to reduce account deletions and the accompanying loss of content, and I believe that an ability to more easily withdraw (not delete) content in certain cases would actually help to prevent more radical and irrevocable actions. In other words – better for someone to withdraw a few hundred IDs than to delete an account and thousands or tens of thousands of IDs. Withdrawing is also reversible: a withdrawn ID can be restored, unlike a deleted one.
While I argued against a request to be able to change one’s IDs en masse (see here), I believe that withdrawing IDs would not have the same repercussions: it would not create disagreements and it would not add IDs without reviewing the observation. It might put some percentage of observations back in “needs ID” but since the idea is that users would be using this option to withdraw IDs that they feel are questionable, this is the correct consequence, since these observations should be revisited.
Having to withdraw hundreds of ID individually may feel like unnecessary punishment to a user who only wants to correct past mistakes and do better in the future; currently it is also rather tricky and time consuming to find such IDs in the first place.
There may be some slight possibility for this to be misused – e.g., someone withdrawing all IDs made for a particular user that they are mad at – but I think the fact that the IDs would withdrawn (preserving the informational content) rather than deleted would make it seem less suitable for such a purpose.
Feature request details:
What I suggest is something like the batch edit page where users could search for all IDs they have added according to parameters such as exact taxon and/or region and select the ones they want to withdraw. The only mass action possible would be withdrawing (it could come with a warning requiring an extra click before it is carried out). Potentially such an interface could also be used to allow users to more easily find and review specific IDs they have made; currently the only good way to to do this is via URL manipulation or external tools. So it would also be useful as a broader tool to allow users to check or revisit past IDs, find mavericks, etc.
But I think what @spiphany is saying is that they then still have to go through and withdraw each one separately. If you have made, say, hundreds of IDs in a given genus, and then the genus is split, potentially each of those hundreds of IDs could end up as a genus-level disagreement.
It might be making things too complicated but one possible addition to this could be to allow the moving of all IDs to a certain taxon up in rank. For example, if someone really thought they knew what they were doing while IDing species in a genus and realize that they may have made a lot of misIDs, they could raise all IDs of one or more species to the genus level. That could also be useful where there are taxonomic changes that confound previous IDs. I’m not sure how well that would address your issues related to using it to change a bunch of IDs at the same time. It seems like there is no harm in an ID going from a species to its genus without reviewing each observation, whereas is someone changed one species to another without looking at each observation could be problematic in some cases.
Our African sp were split off from Nephila - to Trichonephila (brushes on legs, makes them easy to ID even from blurry spider on web pictures) Those (not mine) I picked up and cleared one by one.
Some of our Plectranthus were split off to Coleus, leaving taxonomy orphans now wrong at genus. Again - clearing them one by one and leaving brief comments - worked for me.
But I didn’t have the problem of a huge batch of my own IDs to start with.
Not everybody reads the forum or is conversant with all of the more hidden functions of iNat.
If we want to encourage more people – particularly generalist users – to become active IDers then it seems desirable that they have tools for reviewing (and if necessary, removing) their IDs that are easy to access and do not require esoteric insider knowledge.
IDing has a learning curve. Just as a user may make mistakes in their first few observations while learning the ropes, one’s IDs also improve over time; I suspect most prolific IDers have early IDs (and quite likely more recent ones) that we would now consider ill-advised in the light of more knowledge/experience. While there are ways to find these IDs, it usually requires some careful adjustment of filters and or URL manipulation; this amount of effort does not seem commensurate with the goal – it should not be inordinately difficult to fix one’s mistakes.
One of the threads I linked to was asking for a way to add disagreeing IDs to a higher taxon in a similar situation. I was (and am) against that. I think adding a non-disagreeing higher ID would be less problematic, though I suspect it would be more complicated to implement and would likely come up against the restriction on automatically added content.
For background: I created this feature request largely as a starting point for discussion; it isn’t based on an immediate need, but is rather the outcome of reflections on larger challenges related to a) account deletion and b) ramifications of taxonomy changes. The complexity of these challenges mean that there is probably no single solution, but a variety of things that can be adjusted from different directions to help address some of the contributing factors. And some of these thoughts seemed to be converging on the idea that batch withdrawing might offer an alternative strategy for dealing with some situations where it has not proven possible to address concerns in other ways. (The request did morph somewhat as I was writing it to consider the value of a more general tool for reviewing one’s IDs; I left the request formulated around my original focus, but I am not committed to one direction or another.)
I am with you on finding and fixing my own mistakes. That is why I found iNat’s own dedicated Maverick link so long ago (2021?)
And the Mavericks in turn generated the Pre-Maverick project - since fixing those makes an active and visible difference.
Fixing mistakes (for all of us) is why I work thru Kingdom Disagreements, and plant ID conflicts, and Pre-Mavericks down to Family.
Problem is often that the observer / identifier has gone, dormant - so it does need others to help resolve the ID.
i wonder how often people actually face this kind of scenario (involving hundreds or more IDs)? seems like a relatively unusual case to spend staff development effort to create and maintain an entirely new screen just to handle this case.
also, while i don’t disagree that it would be nice to have a more robust screen in the system to find / view identifications, i also don’t disagree with what seems to be the reasoning of the iNat staff that they shouldn’t create standard functionality to make it easy for folks to add or change IDs en masse.
i think you would be more likely to get some sort of function in the system to help with your requested workflow by asking them to add a keyboard shortcut in the Identify screen to withdraw your current identification in any given observation.
that doesn’t make it easier to find your old identifications, but maybe the existing identifications screen could be expanded to accept more filter parameters, have a more graphical interface for filtering, and then, for each page of identifications, have a function to open the associated observations on either the Explore or Identify screens.
if you were to open up your desired set of associated observations in the Identify page, then if the withdraw keyboard shortcut existed, you could use that to quickly withdraw your identifications. short of having that keyboard shortcut in the system, you could use your own automation extension or program to either automate the withdrawal or to add a non-disagreeing Life ID (which would effectively withdraw existing IDs and might also provide a mechanism to help you find IDs withdrawn this way in the future). (adding a Life ID can already be done in bulk using megachile’s browser extension, and it would probably be a minor update to add functionality to withdraw a user’s current ID.)
it also wouldn’t be difficult to do all of this using a script, but even if someone set up a model script to do this, others would have to be willing to use something like that, and I get the sense that there are folks who would be unwilling to use something like that even it it was well-documented and required no unusual setup.
I would be wary of offering a newbie an easy way to withdraw a batch of their IDs. Better for them, if they care about their IDs on iNat - to work thru each one and learning the details as they go.
I don’t necessarily foresee a desire to batch withdraw IDs, but I’d love an easier way to find old IDs - whether because I’ve since realised they were wrong or based on faulty logic, or because I know something was later identified as this species I’m now looking at, or even because there was an interesting discussion on something I gave this ID to. I know I’ve hunted through my list of IDs before for various reasons, not always successfully. Maybe there are ways to find these things, but if so, I don’t know it. So an easy way to search through old IDs sounds potentially very helpful.
the standard identifications screen provides 5 filter parameters that can be applied in the URL – taxon_id, user_id, category,current, and for (as documented on the right side of the screen).
the API via /v1/identifications provides similar parameters as above, plus observation taxon id, taxon exclusion filters, place id, id date range, taxon rank, and more. i’ve made a page that helps to present the results returned from the API in a more human-friendly format: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_identifications.
I like this idea, as well as making it easier to find a batch of IDs of yours (my understanding is that second part might be difficult). FWIW we don’t plan on adding any more single key shortcuts, so it would have to be a two key one.
This would honestly go a long way to solving this issue IMO. When a taxonomic split or change in taxon understanding occurs, it would be nice to have a quick way to see all the IDs I’ve made of that taxon quickly in the Identify tab. I’d be fine with manually changing each one of them individually, but just bringing them up in one place is currently not a straightforward process (As someone who can’t even spell “API”, the workarounds often suggested on the forum are way beyond me and probably not feasible for the average user to implement- having a search bar at the top of the “Your Identifications” page to filter my IDs by taxon seems like something that should exist by now?)
This happens quite a lot, and there’s going to be a big one soon in the moth world. There are currently 14,000 observations at genus Macaria, and the genus is going to be split this year, so lots of those are going to need changed to a different genus. Same thing happened when Schizura got split a few years ago. It would be great when the split happens if I could just easily bring up everything I called “genus Macaria” and re-assess them all at once to correct them. Whether or not “mass-withdrawal” is implemented, a user-friendly way to filter my own identifications would really solve a lot of headaches. (I’ve also run into the situation before where I ID’d an observation as a certain species, but the CID was held back by someone else’s different ID, and I later have no idea how to find the observation because I don’t know what the CID is- if I could just search my IDs for times I provided that particular ID, these would be much easier to find.)
One of the first things I did when I started using the iNat was to create a bookmark like this so I could easily find all my previous identifications. I suppose it would be nice to have an additional checkbox in the filter dialog for “Your Identifications” to make this even easier - but bookmarking a url doesn’t seem like it should be beyond the average user to implement.
Be aware that you’ll also need to select ‘Reviewed=any’ or you won’t see much…
But yes, that’s a handy link - I don’t think I realised that was an option. There are obviously a lot more url-based search options that I’m still learning about!
Thanks also @pisum for your info earlier. I’ve opened the page but haven’t played with it much yet.
I perhaps should have added that that url is only intended as a starting point. You can add any other common options you need via the filter dialog, and then bookmark the resulting url. I wanted to keep things as simple as possible in my previous post, since the actual bookmark I use looks a lot messier: