Awhile back, I punted an observation up to a higher level, since it was wrong. The original identifier IDed it again to a lower level, again wrong. However, if I ID it as the same thing (dicots in this case), it does not let me disagree with their ID a second time, so iNat has our IDs in agreement (which is not right).
Thanks,
Eric
Ah, you can do roundabout then :-) Delete your previous disagreement and ID anew below the new ID. I do it (rarely) with the users who do not react to comments.
I’d post a comment on the observation explaining why you aren’t confident in an ID, and if they ignore it, then tag some people who know what their doing, and they can help you with the ID.
Edit: I meant to reply to the topic, not to your response.
Your disagreement will still stand. The system remembers what you disagreed to, so eg:
A: Species species
B: (family) Specideae, disagree
B is both IDing at Family and disagreeing to genus and species. These disagreements stay.
So you can leave it as-is.
That’s what I figured would happen and it didn’t work like that.
I guess I’m not supposed to post the link here (sorry!), but it doesn’t show up like that in the output as it would if it was an explicit disagreement. Maybe it is in the system as such, but the interface doesn’t show that and therefore, to a user making an ID, its not visible.
Huh. Send me a pm, that may be a bug…
Also, yeah, it’s not especially visible.
Huh. The normal “do you explicit disagree” dialogue simply won’t appear for me.
As for posting a link, I don’t think this is bad user behaviour, just someone trying to ID by vague guessing.
Note that if you click the Agree button on an existing ID, you will always be considered not to be explicitly disagreeing (I think)
Yeah, I expected it to pop back up and let me disagree once more. Oh well. Not the end of the world.
Time for a bug report ;3
@jurga_li 's method doesn’t work for me (or @astra_the_dragon above). How do I put in a bug report?
And now it works again. Curious.
One user, one vote, unless you specifically change your vote. Otherwise, we would get into ID wars where people make the same ID on an observation over and over, trying to “out-vote” (shout down) someone else. The concept of community consensus wouldn’t work then.
Multiple incorrect ID’s do not equal a correct ID.
But if one “correct IDer” can’t convince even one of those incorrect IDers, then they are not IDing correctly per the iNat model. They don’t get to “decide” that others are wrong, they have to “persuade” them to change their position.
Ya, I think I agree with what you are saying, although not 100% sure. Today I removed a post because multiple people were id’ing it to species level incorrectly. I tried to explain why the image was inconclusive (poor angle, low resolution etc), and should be kept at genus level. But people (with no real names attached to their profile) kept agreeing with the species level ID. Except for one person, who is an expert in the field, and agreed the animal should be kept at genus level (because of the same aforementioned reasons). A couple of the people id’ing just opened accounts today and appear to have zero expertise in the specific genus. I lost a lot of confidence in iNat today. I hope this can be remedied.
The iNat identification model has been around pretty much since they started, and it has been established that it is comparable in overall accuracy to the identifications that occur in curated collections such as museums and herbaria.
If you start off with such a high level of confidence (such that one ID issue can lead to you losing that confidence), then perhaps your expectations are unrealistic. I’m serious here… what gave you the impression that every single ID in iNat had to be 100% “correct”? And who decides what “correct” is?
It’s really quite simple. Someone posts an observation of something, and anyone who looks at it can state what they think it is. The only disqualifier on whether you are allowed to do these things is if you have misbehaved sufficiently in a social sense. You don’t have to be “qualified” to make an ID, because there is no requirement that you be “right”.
When we all put what we think it is, and we all agree, then the CID gets put to that taxon. If we don’t agree, then there is a calculation that takes place to work out what the system will put. This in theory should be in lieu of a discussion amongst the dissenting identifiers that should ultimately reach a concensus. If this concensus is not reached, then it is not a failure of the iNat identification model, but rather a failure of communication amongst the identifiers.
I will agree, there are a number of aspects to iNat that can “foster” that break down in communication:
absentee identifiers
This is just a fact of life… people come and people go… they die, they finish school projects, they lose interest. We get around this by just calling in others to be active in the discussion and outweigh them (tagging or mentioning others). Sometimes the rope-ins are worse sheep than the absentee identifiers, but that’s another issue entirely!
arrogance
Thinking one is right and others are wrong… and while experts might be better qualified and positioned to be “right”, they are also far more prone to that arrogance, and then when they ARE wrong, they have a strong tendency to double down and justify their positions… No one is infallible, no one knows everything, no one has ultimate authority. In iNat we have these top 10s and identification counts etc that “seem” to give weight to an ID, but by and large iNat does a great job of putting the onus back on the “expert” to explain themselves and convince others why they are right.
identify process
The thumbnails and the agree button associated with them can be problematic. Many a time I have been corrected on an ID because I missed a detail not easily seen in the thumbnail. And many a time I have corrected others in similar situations… but that is the advantage of community ID, in that we QC each others IDs and catch many of the mis-IDs.
x) I could go on… but I won’t
Look… it’s simple… iNat is a community… we have a community ID model. If someone wants to be a control freak about what things are identified as, they are going to find it frustrating.
But most of all… if you are not happy with the current CID an observation is sitting at, then it just means the conversation on it hasn’t finished yet! Remember that because of the community ID model, IDs in iNat are very dynamic and can change and morph as time goes on, and as different expertise comes on board, and as new papers are published.