I do tag in people for help. But I add my best ID first. And only ask for help if
the pictures are in focus and show some useful usable information. Blurry smudgy - mark as reviewed. Next
the identifiers I ask are skilled, and busy - so I am very selective (once a week?) about asking for interesting, unusual, ongoing discussion obs. The ones that feel worth their time and effort.
If I don’t know up front who to ask, I use the leaderboard, filter for place, then look for a familiar active and engaging name.
The unfolding discussion is then a wonderful learning curve for me as people spell out why it is or isn’t …
TBH the effort I have to make to decide WHO to ask is what I owe in gratitude for their ID.
I would like iNat to have a popup with a link to a tutorial.
You have posted 100 obs, received 40 IDs, most of your obs are insects - here is your link - see who you can help to an ID. Pay it forward. People need to be reminded that indentifiers are people with lives and issues, not bots.
Yes to all this! I’m really only comfortable with Noctuidae in Canada, and even then, there are groups I don’t touch. If I get a request for help on a species in Peru, say, I’ll try to help, but often I’m out of my depth.
As well, I’m at the top of the leaderboard for a number of moth species, but that is often because I’ll work though a large backload of ID’s at once, and then promptly forget the identifying features!
I like that. When I first got into iNat and was still figuring it out, I would put ID’s on peoples observations that had ID’d my uploads. I still do that occasionally.
how often do you do this that you need a button to automate the process?
Every day. Usually many times a day.
I seem to be one of the few identifiers of Indo-Pacific marinelife who bothers to curate older observations that are taxonomically stuck on here. The process of finding these observations… then clicking on the appropriate taxon page… then searching through the list of identifiers for that taxon… then figuring out which of those users is active and has actual expertise in the taxon… then carefully typing out their user names… then waiting to see if they respond… then repeating the process with more user names if those first few fail to respond… etc…
It is an enormous waste of my time and likely a hindrance for many experts who might otherwise engage more actively on here. My request is primarily intended to assist curators on here. A “Request Help” button would be challenging to implement for the broader user base, unless severe limitations on its usage were imposed.
i think if this were to be implemented in the system, the limitations should really be based not on the ID requestor’s role (curator or not), but on the requestee’s preferences – probably something like a combination of (A) maximum number of ID requests per week, (B) maximum number of ID requests from per requestor per week, and (C) requestors to block.
an ID request should ideally become an entirely new type of activity, separate from the IDs and comments. this way, it would be theoretically possible to build functionality to search for observations not yet reviewed with an ID request (rather than relying entirely on notifications and the dashboard to find these).
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in the meantime, i mentioned earlier that it would be possible to automate some of the flow that you had proposed. just to let you visualize something like that in action, here’s a video of me using Power Automate to fill in top identifiers in the comments field in an observation detail page: https://youtu.be/nkj80kdjm_4. it wouldn’t take much to customize this however you liked. for example, if you wanted to fill things in from the Identify page instead of the Observation detail page, it would only take a few extra actions in the flow setup. it’s also doable to exclude specific users from being mentioned based on a list, or mentioning only the next 3 top identifiers (rather than all of them). when you build your own flow to handle this process, you can control exactly how you want it to work for your use case. (and maybe once you and/or others have been able to try out different flows for a while, you might come back with more structured ideas about how this should work if implemented in the system.)
Given this request isn’t getting much support, you might want to consider other ways of tackling this issue, such as creating a traditional project for observations that you think deserve expert attention, and maybe a journal post once a month tagging relevant people to check out the project. Then you just add the observations to the project as you go along, and identifiers who are interested in helping can filter in Identify to show just corals, or gobies, or whatever, within the project.
I think it could be nice if it had more fancy things behind it…which i’m not sure would be easy to code or implement.
User opts-in to this notification ping
user sets the order/family they want to be pinged for
user can also set the area/region
…which to be fair…means that they are likely to be seen in ‘identify’ pile, but I could see it being nice function that could come live after two weeks from observation posting so that way you can’t just post and insta-ping ‘local identifiers’ with a ton of observations, but it is someone actively using iNat that wishes to know.
This idea makes me queasy. Let’s see if I can explain why.
Suppose you’re in a hotel lobby. If someone comes up and starts a conversation, that’s usually fine. However, if someone rings the bell at the front desk, you don’t go over and answer it unless the hotel is paying you. This feels more like the bell at the front desk.
@dianastuder says “TBH the effort I have to make to decide WHO to ask is what I owe in gratitude for their ID.”
As well, I often work with Genera that are difficult to ID to species. I have spent an hour or more researching one species. Often with no result. I do not consider it a waste of my time.
Some of the best IDs come from groups tracking species. Raptors for instance. Perhaps the request for ID could be handled by a group of volunteer experts rather than an individual.
The default status of an observation is “Needs ID” so if people want to ID, they can filter to find the things that need it, and choose themselves which ones they want to work on. Adding external pressure from people who think identifiers’ time is better spent on their observations rather than someone else’s is just a bit icky.
If such a feature were ever implemented (and please God no!) it should be opt-in rather than opt-out.
Given the lack of support and the amount of work and explanation needed for this, I’m going to it’s not something we’ll do and I’m closing this request.