Rename "Research Grade"? (discussion and polls)

[dianastuder]

And some downvote the Not Wild, because they WANT an ID, thank you.
Which makes for a layer of confusion, and skews the distribution maps.

[nathantaylor]

I propose “Community Reviewed”.

Similar to peer reviewed. It does not imply that the ID is correct and only that the members of the community think it’s correct. All of the above options suggest a level of quality that is not necessarily present. Community reviewed is not a quality assessment but a descriptive one. It can imply higher quality, but is flexible enough to understand that there are times when it fails to provide the correct ID.

[upupa-epops]

I like this. I’ve seen a couple endorsements in other places as well in the past couple days.

[sbushes]

This conversation seems to have been ongoing for a long time and there seems to be a general consensus that it would be of benefit to change it somehow. Are there any feature requests stemming from this or development behind the scenes?

Also @JeremyHussell - the existing poll 2 doesn’t show the currently correct options.
I would also vote for community consensus, if I could, out of those two.
However…if this hasn’t been dynamic across the time period, then it seems somewhat meaningless in any case.

It also doesn’t appear to show some of the ideas within the thread, e.g. @ellen5 's …which is one of the best IMHO.

@ellen5

I wish we would dispense with RG, or any other term, and just show the metric on agrees/disagrees. Let each user judge for him/herself what that implies.

I think, given the number of IDs per observation is massively dependent on geography and taxa…something unnamed, just stating the metric or fraction of agreed IDs, would make the most sense. Or a connected colour spectrum, e.g. from red to green.

I also wonder, why a broader range of these levels couldn’t go to GBIF, with the connected colour or metric. Aiming to achieve RG is connected to me to the desire to be an external datapoint. I’d be less inclined to see it as an either/or goalpoint if there was a broader spectrum of ID quality being passed through.

Also, with regard to

@deboas

For whoever wants to see the sliding scale and how many agree/disagree, this is already displayed clearly on the observation pages

This comment is internal to iNat. I think the spectrum should be visible outside of iNat.

Finally, I think the terms are currently quite lengthy, which can be offputting, but a spectrum of colour, numbers, or acronyms would be simpler, and forces those external to iNaturalist to investigate what that means in order to understand it. This has acceptable precedence for me - with use of creative commons acronyms for example.

[cmcheatle]

@ellen5

I wish we would dispense with RG, or any other term, and just show the metric on agrees/disagrees. Let each user judge for him/herself what that implies.

The issue here whether it is implicit or explicit, there will always be some kind of status, regardless of what you call it or how it is attained, because at some point you have to decide that a record no longer needs to be considered in the needs ID pool, when to share the data with external partners etc.

[sbushes]

sure - I get that. I just mean recognising the spectrum of the quality of the data beyond the “needs ID” point

[sbushes]

( also factoring in that I that the 2.5 % mentioned on this thread is, I think, very misleading, and appears, at first glance to be based on analysis of bird IDs …and/or may well have shifted significantly over the last 2 years )

@bouteloua

From @loarie in July 2018:

We’ve been doing a lot of analyses of the proportion of incorrectly ID’d Research Grade obs. From the experiments we’ve done, its actually pretty low, like around 2.5% for most groups we’ve looked at.

[deboas]

@nathantaylor

I propose “Community Reviewed”

I would vote for this. @JeremyHussell perhaps it is worth adding a third poll, between Community Identified (the current favourite) and Community Reviewed?

[JeremyHussell]

It seems I can no longer edit the initial post to add new options or summarize new ideas, perhaps because it went more than a year without being updated. I’ve closed the polls, but if there’s enough renewed discussion here I’ll create some new ones in a new reply. For now, I think the closed polls are reasonably accurate. The initial results were > 2/3rds in favor of “Community Identified” with ~80 votes, and it looks like in the year or so this topic was inactive the people who bothered to vote were mostly those who disagreed.

[sbushes]

Or both?

For me, I think anything with “community” in is better than “RG/Research Grade”.
But most ideal of the above, might be to have both, to represent differing levels of review.
So for me, I would choose to have three levels.

Observer identified ( Needs ID )
Community identified ( Needs review )
Community reviewed

What arguments are there against extra gradations after the “Needs ID” level?
What downsides would there be to this?

[upupa-epops]

If we’re talking about relabelling the other grades we should do Casual as well. :) Non-wild but otherwise valid, no media (just as valid as incidental eBird checklists, no?), and family-or-above-but-not-further-identifiable all get lumped in with observations that have bad data. But that’s getting off-topic… I know this has been discussed elsewhere on the forum but I can’t find a specific thread.

[sedgequeen]

I like Community Identified and Research Ready.

[sbushes]

Yeah, I nearly threw that in too on my comment
I agree. Less pressing for me. But, also important.

[jasonhernandez74]

@tonyrebelo

Firstly there is “Identification Grade”. I would be happy for this to be called “research grade”. It means that the identification has achieved a certain level of reliability and can be considered true.

And those who do, in fact research captive organisms are equally concerned with the identification being correct. By far the majority of threads posted to AROID-L are requesting the identification of a given cultivated aroid specimen. Given the number of published papers found on JSTOR, Scholar, and other such platforms which report on research conducted with captive animals or cultivated plants, it makes no sense to say that these cannot be research grade. In the aroid world, there are many examples of species which were only described after a botanic garden grew a collected specimen long enough for it to flower.

[JeremyHussell]

Oh wow. I didn’t expect to see this thread resurrected.

As a reminder, this thread is solely about possible different names for “Research Grade”, and pros and cons of same. Please stay on topic if you post in this thread, otherwise it’ll branch off into dozens of different discussions about the “Agree” button, wild vs. non-wild, and other perennial topics about the interface.

Also, this thread has been inactive for such a long time that I’m no longer able to edit the summary and polls in the first post. If enough new ideas accumulate I’ll create a new summary and poll in a comment, or perhaps begin a new thread. For now, the summary and the poll at the top seem to reflect the content of the thread reasonably well.

[jasonhernandez74]

@JeremyHussell

As a reminder, this thread is solely about possible different names for “Research Grade”, and pros and cons of same.

I was trying to agree with @tonyrebelo that Research Grade is useful enough to stay as is, if it can apply both to wild and cultivated; that those designations should be separate from the question of research grade.

Incidentally, I did not request the thread to be reopened; I discovered it because it reappeared in my unread count.

[sedgequeen]

“Research Grade” isn’t great, but I don’t think the alternatives are better so I’d like to not change.

And please, please separate “cultivated” from “casual.”

[nathantaylor]

@sedgequeen Personally, I think Community Reviewed (or an alternative like Community IDed) is far more descriptive and accurately reflect the nature of the observations. Research Ready, Research Grade, or anything comparable seems inaccurate from a strictly technical standpoint almost always requires further refinement to fit the data to the research question being asked. Pre-research Grade would be more specific if you want to emphasize the research element, but I don’t like that nearly as much.