Will the current app or a future version, or even iNat Next introduce better encouragement for adding annotations, like phenology or life stages, for example? It seems like not many people include these details in their observations because this is not available on the observation screen when we upload it. All I see are blank annotations.
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Hi, you can see the status of various feature requests related to annotations here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/search?q=annotation%20in%3Atitle%20%23feature-requests
For example, https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-annotations-when-creating-observations/1513
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I donât know what you mean by âincentivizeâ but iNat does very little in the way of gamifiction for anything in the app or website. We do now display the number of observations a user has annotated on their profile page, though.
Annotations for iNat Next are on the to-do list but may not be included in âhard launchâ of the app.
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It would be good to have the Annotations show up on the Upload screen, but one way I get around the annoyance of not having them when uploading is by setting them once someone validates my observation. Once an update shows up on my screen Iâll open it, review the observation, and add the Annotations. Itâs a little less annoying than having to click on all the observations individually after theyâve been submitted
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Umm. Iâm sorry If incentive gave another sense. I meant to incentivize encourage in a way that, if these annotations are so important (that were included on profile pages) maybe, it would be worth to be shown up on upload screen as optional for users. this annotations are not a way to gamefy the experience, imo. They could even have deep importance for researchers, or even for someone curious that uses iNat to see when a rare flower blooms or a season an insect breeds, and the more people doing it to be seen the better, right?
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Annotations are dependent on the taxon to which they are applied (e.g. âflowersâ are not relevant for observations of mammals). During upload, the observation does not have an ID. Even if you have selected a taxon in the ID field, it is not actually entered until the observation has been uploaded to iNatâs database.
So I suspect making it possible to add annotations directly during upload would require some pretty substantial changes to the upload process. If all annotations were provided as options at this stage (non-taxon-dependent), what would happen to non-applicable annotations once the observation has an ID? (Note that there is currently a bug about an issue related to this). If the list of possible annotations provided were dependent on the ID selected, the page would have to dynamically respond to the content in the ID field.
There are some observation fields that have been linked to automatically generate corresponding annotations (e.g., entering observation fields for âsex of organismâ with the value âmaleâ or âfemaleâ). Some people use this as a way to add indirectly add annotations as part of the upload process, since observation fields can be entered at this stage.
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I donât see why it would be any different to an annotation applied to an observation that is subsequently reidentified to a taxon where it is inapplicable. It just doesnât show.
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agree. after it fetched a suggestion on ID, âapllyableâ annotations would appear . simple
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I just looked at my year in review report and it would be nice to have them recognized on that report as well. I sometimes spend a lot of time just adding annotations and I would have enjoyed seeing that represented there some way just as a way of encouragement.
I also agree that it would be nice to have them on the upload screen once weâve selected a genus or species, etc. I sometimes forget to go back and add mine after uploading.
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