Remove leaderboard from Identify page

I don’t share the concerns about bad IDer behavior, but I still support this on UI grounds alone. More space for observations or larger thumbnails or whatever!

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There is value in every agreeing, even if its 5, 10 or 200. But after achieving research grade, the agreeing should not count to leaderboards. Some “top identifyers” really aren’t exactly experts…

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There’s no easy correction for 10 ids made, and a big question how these were made and how many wrongly agreed observations are in the system only because of mass identifiers (agreers). So definitely those should’ve weighted less than reasonable first 5.

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I’m not sure why the agree button still shows up after that many people already have. Perhaps the identify page shouldn’t include research grade results?

It happens when you don’t refresh the page and observations can be RG and still be shown for you.

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Like the explore page, the identify page can be set to show both, or just research. If someone was wanting to run their stats up, I imagine they are setting it up to show only RG. Removing that feature from the Identify page would do more to curb that undesired behavior than removing the leaderboard. They would then have to use explore page to open individual observations to agree.

The observations with huge amounts of IDs are generally caused by following, posts to this forum, or ID wars.

I have notice some users doing a specific species in bulk. I assume they are either assuring IDs of their well known species, or trying to achieve a good knowledge of variations of the species.

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It’s happened to me this way: I search for a species with which I’m familiar. I “agree” with those observations that have an “agree” button that I feel I can ID via thumbnail, not knowing that I’m the third or 48th vote. Then I feel silly. Then I remember to go back and filter out the research grade ones. I’m not agreeing to run up my numbers, but the outcome and process both are probably undesirable.

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I suppose I generally improve kingdom level observations so it’s not often I view anything research grade. That makes sense.

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I mostly ID unknowns, so I sometimes pile on the second ID. I follow a few people, so sometime I’m 5th or so IDing something of theirs. Of course there is Gerald!

Sometimes a user having removed Community ID can cause some piling on of IDs as well, as people try to get it out of Unknown. :)

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True of course, but iNaturalist lives on “engagement,” experts are just incidental. And in that sense compulsive clickers are very much wanted.

edit: What I’m trying to say here is, please run, don’t walk, and vote for this feature request.

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Personally, I have no interest in leaderboards and I have experienced very little “piling on” by iNat users adding large numbers of uncritical IDs. Certainly all of us may make IDs that others disagree with. A better notification system (soon?) would alert us to that and hasten the learning process.

However, I do feel that it’s very important to allow users to select any combination of “Casual”, “Needs ID” and “RG” observations when using the Identify interface. I use that interface for all sorts of searches for which the Explore interface doesn’t work well. In particular Identify is a lot more practical for using keyboard shortcuts to review photos, and to add annotations and IDs.

By all means, remove the ID leaderboard from the Identify page, but don’t hobble Identify’s search capability.

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In Mexican Naturalista, competition for the “best” statistics is a major problem, imo. People agree left and right to wrong IDs just to get a higher placement on the leaderboard — so much so that they are known as “the Likers” (like that, in English). They do so trying to get some sort of recognition from CONABIO, which gives out yearly “diplomas” to people with the highest numbers of anything (IDs, observations, etc). The truth is, we end up with people uploading, say, 10 photos of the same individual in 10 separate observations, many times over, and “liking” (agreeing) to hundreds of IDs, one after the other, without even checking or knowing anything on the subject. And my major peeve with that is the amount of wrongly ID’d RG observations that are being exported to GBIF or others.

Here is a good example of what I mean (all comments in English):

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/7430867

I don’t think iNaturalist/Naturalista is meant to be as a “competition” of any kind, and I believe leaderboards tend to “feed” that attitude in certain people. I vote to remove them!

Greetings to all.

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Unless all other leaderboards are removed, which is a broader request and topic, I doubt removing this one will change any behaviour. And frankly I have my doubts even removing all of them would curtail it too much.

That being said, I did vote for this paticular request because as noted above from a UI perspective I see no reason for it, nor any valid use case for it on this particular screen.

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I just noticed that leaderboard on the ID page no longer shows, and the space formerly occupied by it can now be collapsed.

Thank you.

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Thanks to @kueda for this change!

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Yay, good work @kueda!

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In case anyone is looking for the progress bar that used to display above the leaderboard, it’s now in this collapsible panel.

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