I have no objection to just being and enjoying. However, this is a citizen science platform. I think it is the scientific mindset that drives us to ID things to the species level. I do think that observations that are at the generic or family level have value, depending on the taxon. Also, the color coding (green for research grade, yellow for needs ID) sends its own message. A decision could be made by iNaturalist staff that certain taxons could be color coded green at the genus or family level and be called something other than Needs ID. (I didn’t come up with this idea. I’ve seen it mentioned more than once in the forum. And here it is again.)
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No I didn’t. Thanks. That does look better. 
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It is extremely difficult to find oneself reminded time and again this platform is meant Not For You, that the regular people irk and annoy the specialists, that if we do not have the knowledge coming in we should just be quiet and get out of the way, that if we do not, those who know better will implement rules to restrict what we can and cannot do.
If just being and enjoying is not an acceptable option, if being responsible for one’s own behavior and letting others manage themselves is not either, if the only options palatable are to put restrictions in place to control the behaviors of a select group of others, perhaps it is time for me to reconsider iNat, for it loses any appeal whatsoever.
The suggestion that this is a geography-based behavior and the non-question of that assertion is extremely problematic.
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Stay with us Lucy.
They would like to - but iNat staff push back. We will always have this friction between good intentions and fresh enthusiasm on one side, and correct science on the other. But if we can get the two sides to pull together it becomes very interesting (in a good way). Intentions and enthusiasm can be harnessed For Science.
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Thank you for saying that in a much more diplomatic way than I could have ever managed. I have felt the same frustration even though I am living inside the region with the most observers and identifiers.
Please don’t leave iNat or the forum. I always find your posts thought-provoking even when I might disagree.
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I disagree. I think this would be extremely damaging.
Can you clarify whether your proposal refers to the use of the “agree” button, or whether you think that observers should not be able to update their IDs at all in response to feedback?
If you are proposing the latter, you are essentially saying that observers get one chance to get their ID right. They cannot correct their own mistakes and they are not allowed to learn from experience.
It means that users have to do all their research before uploading the observation, because if they initially upload their observations as a batch with broader IDs and later refine the IDs when they have had time to consult their literature, someone else may have entered an ID in the meantime and they will no longer be able to add their refined ID. Meanwhile, they are free to add that same ID to any observation except their own. Doesn’t this seem rather illogical?
(If we’re going to give observers only one chance, why not apply the same rule to IDers – i.e., if you make a mistake, you can withdraw your ID but you cannot correct it? If this sounds wrong to you, why is it OK to restrict observers this way?)
Wouldn’t you like to be able to ID your own observation when you know what something is?
You have not responded to these concerns, voiced by multiple people in this thread.
Do you see why this is a concern to many of us? Even to those of us who are IDers ourselves and are frustrated by users who blindly agree to our IDs?
Not allowing users to revise their IDs based on new knowledge is completely counter to the spirit of a citizen science project. On a website where the entire validation process is based on the principle that anyone can add an ID, and where a large portion of IDs are made by people who are not trained scientists, preventing users from adding IDs to their own observations seems like it disempowers them rather than empowering them. It actively discourages the flow of information and learning, because it tells them that their own efforts to understand what they saw don’t matter.
I would like to see better education of observers about when they should confirm someone else’s IDs, but this proposal only punishes and discriminates against people who are still learning. It is not the way to fix the problem of uncritical agrees.
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This sentence is nonsense. Because iNat is international you may find if you crunch the numbers, for Them Over There, that we together add up to a larger number of iNatters. And we have, on our side, some good and better identifiers - depending which taxon you look at.
If you don’t want to risk anyone agreeing with your tentative ID, then apply an ID where you remain confident, even after agreement.
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This phenomenon is clearly real, anyone who has added the first dissenting ID for anything would be familiar with it.
But I think what’s much less clear are the real reasons why that might be happening and their relative frequencies - which is a problem when all of the suggested solutions are based on assuming knowledge of the One True Cause of this problem when there isn’t a whole lot of evidence for why people are doing this.
It’s quite possible that a lot of the people “agreeing” with a dissenting ID, are really just saying they think it’s more likely you are right than they were - without understanding the consequences you fear may follow from that.
When you add an ID, they get a notification pointing them to a comment on that observation which gives them the options “Compare” and “Agree” …
So they click compare, see that what you suggested looks more like their observation than their initial guess, and so then “agree” with it.
Assuming they don’t actually disagree and choose to dig their heels in, any other option is a lot more obscured. If they want to withdraw their ID, they need to know to go to their original ID and look at the options hidden in the drop down menu there. To even know to look for that option, they need to know why they are looking for it.
A lot of these people aren’t biologists - so surely for a lot of them, identifying critters goes something like “What’s that? That’s a bloop bloop bird. Oh, cool thanks!”, and they trust it really is a bloop bloop bird because most of us were brought up in a world full of Lies For Children, where everything was certain and nothing was grey.
Taking away the agree button doesn’t fix that. It just confirms they live in a world where everything is made unnecessarily hard to Protect Us From Danger.
What might be better is if it acted a bit more like a disagreement - prompting a secondary confirmation something like “I’m now sure it really is this species” vs “I’m not certain it really is this species, but it looks more like it than my previous suggestion”.
Where the lesser option might default to adding ID at a higher taxon, or adding an ID with a lower “confidence score” than the default, or even simply withdrawing the original suggestion.
But either way, I think it’s important to consider that probably the majority of the “offenders” in this case think they are acting in good faith, and would quite likely act differently if that was properly explained to them. Not everyone obsesses over knowing all the intricacies of the tools they use before they try using them in the way that seems most obvious. A good UI can guide them in the right direction, but not nearly as well or as quickly as a supportive peer group might.
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I think this is an important part of what bothers me about users reflexively agreeing with IDs they cannot confirm. I think a lot of times the observer intends it to express gratitude, but there is a sense in which it does the opposite – because it sends a message, essentially, that the time and work that the IDer has dedicated into learning how to ID a taxon or figuring out a difficult observation doesn’t mean anything if the user is just going to use the IDer’s suggestion without taking the time to understand it themselves.
This isn’t about gatekeeping or making IDs the exclusive domain of “experts” or about some idea that if I had to suffer for my knowledge others shouldn’t be allowed to take shortcuts. I’m happy to explain an ID if a user is interested, and if my explanation allows them to ID the same taxon successfully in the future – so much the better. But blind agrees feel rather like just copying someone else’s answers to a math problem and claiming it as one’s own instead of going through and figuring out how they solved it.
It is also why this suggestion doesn’t sit right with me:
Why should I withdraw an ID that I made in good faith and put effort into, while the user who put no effort into it at all gets to enjoy the credit and benefit from that ID?
I do continue to follow observations that I have ID’d and I see it as my responsibility to do so – i.e., withdrawing or changing my ID if it proves to be wrong, responding to questions or additional information from the observer/other IDers, etc.
But I see the ID process as a cooperation between IDers and observer. This means that everyone entering an ID has a certain responsibility to ensure that it is correct to the best of their knowledge. If IDers are expected to withdraw their ID because someone else incautiously agreed to it, this in essence absolves the other person of responsibility and puts the entire onus on the IDer. I reject the idea that I should be responsible not only for my own ID, but also for other people’s actions.
(I mean, I have occasionally done precisely this – withdrawn an ID I was not sure enough about when the observer agreed with me, or tagged another IDer, or suggested an ID in a comment rather than as an ID. But I should not have to do this. I should be free to suggest an ID according to my best knowledge and be able to rely on other users to verify or correct it. This requires, however, that other users also take responsibility for their own IDs.)
I also suspect that many users – particularly app users – are not fully aware of the citizen science aspect of iNat and what this means. They may not have thought about how observations that they post are used by scientists, how IDs are made, or what they are actually doing when they click “agree” on an ID. I think this is an area where iNat could definitely improve its messaging and user education.
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Sorry if my words were misleading! I did not mean that people behave differently in various parts of the world. What I meant is that, for example, in Central Europe, every butterfly observation is checked by many experts who can accurately identify them. This is very different in remote areas, where observations can remain unverified for years. An observation might reach research grade with initial ID confirmations, but it can take several more years until another ‘expert’ reviews the photo and either confirms or disagrees with the identification.
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Regarding the other matter, my suggestion is that the observer should be allowed to assign any ID in advance and can use any new ID if it hasn’t already been given by someone else.
If there are better solutions, that’s great. However, I believe it is crucial to minimize the issue of people confirming observations without verifying them against any literature or other sources.
This was my best idea for mitigating the problem.
I agree that we should not forbid someone to add a particular ID to an observation, but, as an identifier, forbidding me to “agree” with an ID better than mine would not make me feel incomfortable. If an ID better than mine comes next, either I do nothing (if it’s refining my ID) or I withdraw my ID (if it’s disagreeing with it and I have no clear reason to think I am right).
Not making an observation RG too soon is a major concern for me. It’s more valuable if someone else comes later and review the observation.
I don’t intend to learn from every observation/ID. It is more than enough if I can ID at the rank tribe and I need not learn all species in the tribe (and I would like to disable notifications of refining IDs).
I like to see an expert confirm my ID. I like to confirm the ID of an expert after I learnt (and then to ID similar observations, as it happened for Senna weddelliana (short story)). But if an expert disagrees with my wrong ID, in most cases, I have no motivation to confirm the expert’s ID.
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You realise this happens all the time in the world of Real Science™ too right? Someone will write a paper describing some species and have it published in a peer reviewed journal, and it can take several more years (or even centuries!) until another expert reviews the type specimen or other populations or the description in the original paper and either confirms or disagrees with the identification.
So maybe we just need to worry a bit less about things here being transiently RG because eventually another reviewer will come along and point out what the people before them may have missed :D
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You keep making these statements that are supposed to be taken at face value. Source for this?
People worldwide, even professionals, make mistakes. And often experts are taxon experts, not limited to geographic areas. For example: John Ascher, bees.
I have no idea what this means. I am also curious why the word expert is in quotes whereas in your statement above regarding Central Europe the word experts is used without quotes.
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I want to be clear: I am troubled all the way back to the first post.
I was interested to read this but could not find the Observation. I do wonder if this country has a registry of species, as we do.
Let us talk of these Silver Bee Flies. 256 Observations, only 75 of which are Research Grade. I am confused how these bear on the Observer agreeing with Identifier issue?
I am alarmed that persons are being asked to qualify themselves in languages that are not their native tongues to an arbitrary person and then any hesitancy or reluctance to do so is being presumed to demonstrate inferiority.
Nobody is required to prove themselves to the satisfaction of another, and the act of putting someone in quotes, a la “expert identifier”, is perhaps insensitive and misunderstanding at best. Not all of us speak the same languages with the same degree of fluency; not all of us enjoy the same time, connectivity or desire to communicate at length with others. You have the right to disagree or identify to a higher taxon, whatever.
Additionally, there are species for which “this is the only species that has been observed in this geographic area” is a reasonable explanation for why it is a horse silhouette not a lookalike zebra from four countries away.
I can understand that when you spend significant time on something, it is upsetting for an Observer to just agree seemingly willy-nilly. That said, you cannot possibly know this to be their sole motivation:
they don’t have any clue about the ID of the taxon - they just want to receive research grade.
Respectfully, can you please try to state your positions and proposals without “the problem with these people/ in this area/outside this area” language and/or intimations that one group of people needs to answer to another?
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[Response to a deleted post]
I thought about confirming this ID for example, in order to reach RG (and later get that species included in the CV model, which is beneficial to the community). I didn’t mean confirming an expert’s ID on my observation.
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I think this captures the two key points in relation to the overall debate.
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RG isn’t forever. Research Grade is a non-permanent designation specific to iNaturalist that reflects a certain minimum level of community confidence. That level of confidence can (and should) change with additional input from iNat users. Although reaching RG increases the visibility of an observation on iNat, and means that it will get exported to external platforms such as GBIF, any researcher should make their own assessment of the quality of identifications. If you see an observation with an incorrect RG ID, almost always you can remove it from RG by adding your own correct (and conflicting) ID.
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We don’t need to worry too much. It may be worthwhile discussing tweaks to the UI that could guide people to better understand the impact and intention behind a choice such as agreeing with an ID. But any change that significantly impedes legitimate use is likely to be counterproductive and opposed. Better to fix IDs that you see to be incorrect and not to worry that some observations may spend a long time at “Needs ID” as a result.
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I deleted my post because I when I wrote it thought I was responding to someone else, so it was no longer relevant.
But this was sort of my point – if you want to be able to change your mind and confirm an ID on someone else’s observation because you have learned it, why should you be prevented from doing the same on your own observation?
This is not about wanting the observation to become RG – it is about having the power to add an ID on my own observation that says I know what it is. Not some broader ID, this precise species. Just because this is sometimes (even frequently) abused is not a sufficient reason to deny everyone the ability to learn and to assert their knowledge in the form of an ID.
If users are blocked from entering the ID they want, they will find some other way to do so, whether that be deleting their observation and reuploading it or some other even more questionable method. Or they may decide that they are unwelcome on iNat because they are being treated as ignorant and incapable of understanding how to ID organisms they saw themselves.
This is the wrong way to solve the problem at hand. The price is too high.
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What iNat calls Research Grade only means - 2 people agree
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/rename-research-grade-discussion-and-polls/590
Perhaps another wording for the ‘agree’ button would do the trick, something along the line: I know ho to identify this taxon and do agree.
Users should be aware that agreeing means you know yourself (usually after some research) how to ID this species.
Or a popupwindow once you use the agree feature