An attempt to summarize a few of the issues and existing and potential solutions for attracting accurate identifications.
“iNaturalist isn’t useful” “It’s just a toy” “Instagram for nature”
- A general “iNaturalist is useful” page? Expand/improve this one?
- Using iNat as your data platform guide
- Feature research or conservation wins that came from iNat observations (see many examples on the iNat blog and social media)
“iNaturalist is full of bad data and a waste of my time”
- Provide page for public-facing stats on accuracy based on blind ID experiment with experts and corrections to computer vision or “previously RG” IDs
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Address data quality issues w/ computer vision, such as
- improving the use of geopatial data in suggestions (fewer California endemic spp. suggestions in Russia)
- and manually removing overconfident taxa from the suggestions
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Address data quality issues with too-quick agreement
- Remove Agree buttons in some places?
- …reputation system?
- Show how iNat can be used for work
“I need 100% control over the taxonomy”
- I don’t think iNat is likely to develop a free-for-all where people can enter whatever they want as an ID, though I would like to be able to at least sort observations by my ID, and
- Have an easier way to export observations with my IDs as the labels
- Users can use a project to export “project curator ID”
- As observers, they can opt out of community ID
- iNaturalist can deviate from the standard taxonomic authorities if needed
Prompting iNatters to help ID
- Cultivate a community of mutually helpful identification (IDing obs of people who helped ID yours)
- Add Identify link to taxon pages
- Add Identify link to user pages
- Occasional efforts like Carrie’s email
- Personal requests as comments or messages (don’t be spammy though)
- Highlight the community aspects of iNat by emailing the blog posts since not everyone looks at the website
Not sure how to use Identify page
- Direct people to or automatically surface the video tutorial
- Create an easy-to-digest non-video tutorial page
- A way to internally Bookmark or remember frequently used Identify filters
Lack of confidence to help ID
- Cultivate a welcoming community where anyone can make a mistake without fear of being yelled at
Lack of knowledge to help ID
- Collect/Display helpful IDs
- Improve associated Wikipedia pages
- Host in-person identification parties/ID skill shares (would be a good topic to start on the forum for people who have done this)
- Create a Quiz/Practice mode
Improvements to ID tools
- Easy way to ID from mobile
- Option to Hide observations on maps to improve loading times
Get feedback on helpful IDs
- Highlight helpful IDs
- Tony does frequently highlight identifiers in his Observation of the Week blog posts
- Emphasize Improving and Leading IDs
- Some very modest badges or automated acknowledgment of helpfulness could be useful for spurring additional activity, e.g. “Thanks! You just added an Improving ID for the first time!” or, when the community confirms it, “That’s the first time you’ve IDed SpeciesX!” (and not anything like “Congrats on adding 1000 IDs, can you get to 2000???”)
Prevent ID burnout
- There’s a whole topic about making identification more fun/interesting!