Several topics recently have touched on the idea that we need more people doing IDs. It’s been said that the number of observations is overwhelming the ID process, that expert taxonomists are hard to recruit, and that identifying can be a burdensome chore (a perspective that isn’t likely to help wi…

I think an underrated way of recruiting people to the site is actually just telling them how cool and useful it is and putting it in a context where it appears useful to their work. I’ve been telling my honours supervisor about iNat for months. Last week he got me to put up photos from one of the 3r…

Hi all, I’m a mid-level user and try to do ID’s on an irregular basis. In fact, I had made a mental note to try to do more and then stumbled across another thread in this Forum where some folks were taking the position that it is unhelpful and even unwelcome to add in a simple ID such as “flowerin…

Another mid-level user here :wave: Going off what @jakubmamulski said, making it easier to ID observations from the mobile app would definitely help. While I try to ID on a semi-regular basis, I know I would ID a lot more often if I didn’t have to get on the computer every time. I know there’s the …

Do you remember the thread where people said it was unhelpful to ID unknown obs as simple stuff (could you link me)? I thought the opposite would be true; general IDs nonetheless narrow it down and allow people following certain taxa to see the obs.

I think it’s useful, @scubabruin . And it’s not unwelcome. Keep it up!

[image] thebeachcomber: Do you remember the thread where people said it was unhelpful to ID unknown obs as simple stuff (could you link me)? https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-do-some-serious-power-users-add-so-many-unknown-observations/282/34

Cheers paloma and scubabruin. From an extremely quick skim the only problem seems to be that you’re IDing things before the user can ID it themselves? Personally don’t think this is an issue at all (assuming you give a correct ID of course). The problem with not giving IDs for unknowns is Questagame…

Yes, that’s the thread. If you go through the many comments, you’ll find a few comments about coarse ID’s not being welcome (not just for the power users), but in general. They talk about beginning users getting these coarse ID’s and how that could turn them off from continuing to use the site. I…

Yeah I just read through the thread more and understand the viewpoint of disrupting someone’s workflow. Seems callous, but I think those people just have to deal with that disruption; personally I think giving coarse IDs has more benefits than downsides. This of course comes with a caveat relating t…

Recruiting more identifiers

General

saturnring April 22, 2019, 12:32am 39

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-do-some-serious-power-users-add-so-many-unknown-observations/282/34

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Recruiting more identifiers

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