Recruiting more identifiers

I interpreted the idea to be in the “mid-level user” category, not the “identifier of the month” category.

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So imagine there’s only one person out there that knows how to ID a particular group, or at the very least maybe there’s only one person on iNat that knows. One approach of looking at this is: how can we motivate this one person to invest countless hours of their time in providing a service for the site? For some of us that may sound like fun, but I’m guessing others would rather be doing something else with their time. I think, instead, we should be asking experts to help pass down their knowledge. One hundred IDs are great, but maybe more valuable is a single ID that details the hows and whys. Studious iNatters can then use this knowledge down the line to identify observations. Yes, there is potential for the less-experienced to misinterpret the details, so yes expert verification will always remain valuable, but I think many of us here are more than eager to learn not just the names of what we’re seeing but also why they are those things.

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Yes, and a well-organized way to access these.

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I think that would be some issues that’d need to be addressed. On the other hand, identifying isn’t equally simple for all of the users, not even on the knowledge level. People who don’t use English as their main language are in a disadvantageous position, and using latin terminology is also quite hard at times. Let me show you an example:
There’s a wood anemone of which I made an observation. I happen to know that this plant is called “zawilec gajowy” in my language, but I have, at the moment, no idea how it’s called in English. What I usually do is that I leave the app, enter Chrome, Google zawilec gajowy, see that it’s caled anemone nemorosa in latin, I boot the iNaturalist app again and I end up writing it’s latin name as the ID.
There’s no way to make it easier for people who speak other languages at the moment.

A tutorial would be nice, too.

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I think we need to combine bugguide with inaturalist. It would bring many experts and information about many NA species of insects.

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I imagine that for a lot of us part of the difficulty is just the connection requirements for efficiently going through dozens of observations. Anywhere the interface can be streamlined in terms of the required bandwidth and processing power would be a big help. When it takes several minutes to open an image to get a close enough view to see certain features needed for ID, it’s a limiting factor (I do really wish it was possible to right-click an image to then load just that image in a new tab in the background- sites where I can do that, similar-sized images seem to load a lot faster than they do in the iNat setup where they load as an overlay on the current page that moves around as you move your mouse instead of having scrollbars and whatnot). That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the site developers have already put a lot of effort into that already, so I’m not sure how much that can feasibly be improved.

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Opening an image in a new tab?

I haven’t used bugguide but it strikes me as much more top down and structured than inat. Not in ways I personally like.

Nonexistent/Incomplete translation can definitely be a hurdle to overcome for identification / identifier recruitment. But in your example, just type in zawilec gajowy and Anemone nemorosa will pop up, since it’s already listed as a common name for that species.

image

Anyone can add common names in their native language by going to the taxon page>Taxonomy tab>Add a name.

A selection for Anemone nemorosa:

Anyone can help with translation of the site and apps, too. Looks like only 15% of the site has been translated into Polish so far (needs 75% to be released live).

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I think, but I am not sure, that Master Naturalist volunteers need to contribute a certain number of volunteering each year to keep their certificate. It might be possible to set up something where they do part of these hours as volunteers helping the iNaturalist community, for example identifying wildflowers or butterflies or trees from their home state.

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I didn’t even know about this feature and I’m quite impressed. Thanks for letting me know!

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@ jakubmamulski Jakub, one note if you want to add any names in Polish, because the site is not translated into Polish, there is actually a 2nd step you need to do. After you enter the name, when it goes back to the main screen, you need to find the entry, click edit, and then in the Places section you need to Add a Place (which will obviously be Poland in this case) and save it.

To see the names in Polish, you would need to go to your account settings and in the middle column where it says Prioritize common names used in this place, enter Poland.

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my experience with master naturalists, master gardeners, etc. is mixed. (no offense to any master naturalists, etc. out there.) if you’re going to develop a crossover program like that, i’d almost rather target boy and girl scouts – get an iNat badge after doing 100 research observations and 100 identifications for others, or something like that. maybe develop some eagle scout or gold award projects that incorporate iNaturalist (ex. organizing a bioblitz and using the data to do some sort of conservation / outreach / research). lots of kids have lots of free time during summers and breaks, and if you can get them interested in nature early in life, all the better. also, a boy or girl scout who already has an iNat badge in a class just about to do a bioblitz would probably be super helpful.

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I don’t use the app, but I’m looking at it on my iPhone now. I think there are people on iNat who almost always use the app for their own observations, and correctly ID some of their own observations, but don’t ever seem to ID for others. Maybe they just don’t know how to do it? Maybe they don’t know that there is a nice filterable Identify tool on the website? I don’t know the answers to my own questions here, but just wondering if that’s part of the reason some mid-level users don’t engage more.

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i bet a lot of it is just that people don’t know where to even begin. i think average people out there don’t know about plant keys and bugguide and that sort of thing. i’d love it if there was some sort of recommended resources list available that could be filtered by taxon and geography.

and then even if they do, i think there’s a problem of how to break things down into manageable chunks. i think for most people, it would make the most sense to break things down into smaller places (neighborhoods, parks, etc.) that they are familiar with, but most people probably don’t know how to even begin creating places in iNat. (i guess you could also break things down by going after specific taxa, but i think that makes for a different kind of experience.)

and then if you overcome that, there’s the whole thing about learning the mores and customs of the community. there’s lots of discussion on that. so i won’t rehash all that here, but one of the things i brought up in another thread is maybe having a little indicator on a persons first X number or first day’s worth of observations and/or identifications. that way, the community can be super welcoming (and very gentle in criticisms) when they see a person’s first identifications come through. there’s nothing better to promote future identifications than when other people express appreciation for a job well done. (i think that would be more effective than an identifier of the week thing, since i think the chances of any one person being selected for identifier of the week is probably relatively low.)

of course there are also ways to change up the system to make it easy to use, but i won’t get into too many ideas for that (yet), other than to say that i think the key again is to break things up into manageable chunks. for example, instead of showing an unlimited number of things to identify, maybe instead give people 5 or 10 to identify per day. (there’s more of a sense of accomplishment if you can finish off a defined set than if you do 10 and see that there are 1000 more to do.)

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  1. Most academics are very busy working on papers and other things that will help propel their careers. We do have some academics on here, but most do not have enough spare time to do this kind of thing. Or they think they don’t.
    Many older retirees are not very computer, cell-phone, or internet-savvy.

  2. Some mid-level users are reluctant to take time away from their own observations in order to ID other people’s obs. Or they don’t feel confident enough to do it.
    Some people care only about being on top of the relevant leaderboard.

  3. More recognition for hard-working ID-ers would be nice.

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Rather than recruit identifiers, I think a better solution would be to “convert” observers to identifiers. If people using the app are genuinely interested in nature, I think there has to be at least some interest in learning to identify organisms on your own, rather than rely solely on the app (and community) to tell you what they are. I think the app should help teach users how to identify a species, and in doing so they become more confident in IDing other people’s observations.

To enable this, I think it would be helpful if curators could add custom-written “Field Notes” on Taxon Pages, and have them show up when viewing taxa on the phone app (instead of the Wikipedia description, which does not always help a user know what to look for when identifying a species). It’s a similar function encouraged on the all but abandoned Guides on iNaturalist.

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I guess we could also use this new filter in the meantime to try to find responsive newcomers in this group: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/account-creation-filter-added-to-identify-page/1991

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Searching through several pages, i finally found out how many IDs i made for others … about 270. Îf that number were more visible, more people would want to increase theirs.

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You can find your ID count very easily under your profile; single click on your profile pic in the upper right corner of the page, and it’s the listed on the left under the profile tab along with no. of observations, no. of species, journal posts, etc.

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