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.
2 Likes
I propose āCommunity Reviewedā.
Similar to peer reviewed. It does not imply that the ID is correct and only that the members of the community think itās 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.
13 Likes
I like this. Iāve seen a couple endorsements in other places as well in the past couple days.
5 Likes
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 doesnāt show the currently correct options.
I would also vote for community consensus, if I could, out of those two.
Howeverā¦if this hasnāt been dynamic across the time period, then it seems somewhat meaningless in any case.
It also doesnāt appear to show some of the ideas within the thread, e.g. @ellen5 's ā¦which is one of the best IMHO.
I think, given the number of IDs per observation is massively dependent on geography and taxaā¦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 couldnāt 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. Iād 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
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.
1 Like
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.
3 Likes
sure - I get that. I just mean recognising the spectrum of the quality of the data beyond the āneeds IDā point
( 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 ā¦and/or may well have shifted significantly over the last 2 years )
3 Likes
I would vote for this. @JeremyHussell perhaps it is worth adding a third poll, between Community Identified (the current favourite) and Community Reviewed?
2 Likes
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. Iāve closed the polls, but if thereās enough renewed discussion here Iāll 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 āCommunity Identifiedā 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.
2 Likes
Or both? 
For me, I think anything with ācommunityā in is better than āRG/Research Gradeā.
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 āNeeds IDā level?
What downsides would there be to this?
2 Likes
If weāre 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 thatās getting off-topicā¦ I know this has been discussed elsewhere on the forum but I canāt find a specific thread.
8 Likes
I like Community Identified and Research Ready.
3 Likes
Yeah, I nearly threw that in too on my comment 
I agree. Less pressing for me. But, also important.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
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.
2 Likes
Oh wow. I didnāt expect to see this thread resurrected.
As a reminder, this thread is solely about possible different names for āResearch Gradeā, and pros and cons of same. Please stay on topic if you post in this thread, otherwise itāll branch off into dozens of different discussions about the āAgreeā button, wild vs. non-wild, and other perennial topics about the interface.
Also, this thread has been inactive for such a long time that Iām no longer able to edit the summary and polls in the first post. If enough new ideas accumulate Iāll 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.
2 Likes
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.
2 Likes
āResearch Gradeā isnāt great, but I donāt think the alternatives are better so Iād like to not change.
And please, please separate ācultivatedā from ācasual.ā
3 Likes
@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 donāt like that nearly as much.
5 Likes