Also, the community ID is still at genus-level. I think that’s what’s actually “research-grade”. It’s just that the observation’s ID is finer. It’s just that the page design isn’t built well for the uncommon situations when there’s a disconnect between the community ID and the observation ID.
Somebody clicked “Yes, it can be,” cancelling out the “No.” Problem solved for this observation.
This is a well known problem – but sometimes it’s not a problem. If somebody ID’s an organism to subspecies and I add a species ID, it goes to RG with the subspecies name. That’s fine with me.
But if you look at “community ID” on those, I think it’ll only be “Research Grade” to species, not subspecies.
Yes, the CID determines Research Grade, but unfortunately it is the Observation ID that is sent to GBIF, not the CID. This means that observations can effectively be sent to GBIF with only one user agreeing on the more specific ID.
We discussed this today. From my understanding as a non-engineer, a fix would probaby require a change to how the observation taxon and community taxon work, or even potentially just using the community taxon for both, which would also have its drawbacks. A change like that would probably require extensive reindexing, potentially of every observation on the site, so that they are evaluated and index according to this new rule, which would probably mean a downtime of several days. So it’s not a simple fix.
What if we changed this to work like the IDs do?
Either 2 agree.
Or simply 3 against 1 votes.
That might help to prevent confusion - why won’t this obs go to RG (because someone clicked Can Be Improved, or the the newbie used it to mean - my ID is as good as I can)
Instead of a single vote having such a major and disconcerting impact.
Since Community Taxon is clearly labelled as such. Perhaps the ‘Observation (display ID visible at the top) Taxon’ should have its own clear label to make it obvious that there are TWO different things there.
Especially since the 2 sometimes agree, and other times don’t. And either way RG is visually attached to the (wait there are TWO IDs?!) wrong one.
And it should generate a notification as Annotations and Observation Fields do. That would also help to make it clear to us what is happening to That Obs.
Going forward, this will no longer happen. We’ve updated the algorithm so that an observation will no longer be Research Grade if the observation taxon and the community taxon do not match.
However, this change is not being applied retroactively. So if an observation was RG before today with a community taxon at species and an observation taxon at subspecies, it will remain that way unless it’s reindexed. Observations are reindexed when something gets added to or changed on them, such as a new ID, a DQA vote, a fave, etc. So reindexing an observation like the one described previously will make it Needs ID. I’ve done it for https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/40276969, which was mentioned in a post above.
You’ll also see a new line in the Data Quality Assessment:
I think it is good that observations will no longer become RG in situations such as the first example in this thread, where there is a single species-level ID in combination with the DQA “ID cannot be improved”. One challenge with using the DQA for observations that cannot be refined further than genus is that it requires constant vigilance about any subsequent IDs added to the observation because if someone decides (rightly or wrongly) to refine the ID further, it will become for all practical purposes RG at species unless the DQA gets countervoted or removed or the DQAer reenters their genus ID to actively disagree with the new species level ID.
However, I am not sure if this is the best way to solve the problem.
I am concerned that there may be some potentially undesired effects of this change particularly in cases where infraspecific levels are not used regularly or consistently because they are not widely known or accepted by everyone as being a meaningful or valid distinction. So you might have a common taxon where most users identify to species, but there are a few users who will add subspecies IDs. These subspecies IDs do not get confirmed (but also not disagreed with) because most people lack either the knowledge or inclination to agree at subspecies level. I can imagine this turning into a situation similar to opted-out observations where multiple users end up trying to ID an observation that won’t become RG even though everybody agrees about what species it is. For some taxa, this could result in a fair number of observations being unnecessarily prevented from becoming RG or potentially even losing RG status if someone later adds an infraspecific ID. It isn’t clear to me whether infraspecific IDs will continue to otherwise function as they have in the past (namely, that they don’t change the observation ID unless they are the first ID for the observation or the infraspecific ID has enough votes that it is also the community ID).
Just to confirm, it’s intentional that observations with the following characteristics are Casual?
- a community taxon ranked subfamily or below but above species
- observation taxon is finer ranked from one leading ID, like species
- someone marked community taxon can’t be improved
If so, it looks like the text explaining that is missing here:
Progress, iNat is now ‘working as intended’ and ALSO as I expect it to - can be Needs ID at ssp. Instead of leaping from RG at sp … then jumping straight to RG at ssp. (I waited 4 years)
I agree, both of these cases are pretty common and the new solution doesn’t seem ideal.
Example of the subspecies case here, not RG despite 3 agreeing species IDs. My experience is that in North America subspecies are rarely used or valued and you’ll get a lot of situations like this. But there are contexts like African megafauna where subspecies are more widely used and the current approach would make a bit more sense…
Your 4 examples are all RG now. 3 at ssp, and the fourth at sp.
Hmm, whether intentional or not I don’t think it should work like that. Will take a look.
I suspect this wouldn’t be a common case? And can be remedied with a Yes vote for now.
Not all that uncommon, no. And a “yes” vote in the DQA is a bad solution.
A lot of what I ID falls in the category of “often cannot be ID’d to species based on photos”. In many cases there are various levels between genus and species to help narrow down the ID. It is not unusual for an observation to end up with multiple IDs at different levels, depending on how good the IDers are at understanding which of these finer categories they need to use if the possibilities can be narrowed beyond genus but not to a single species.
If people are using the DQA to make observations RG above species level as part of managing workflows or cleaning up a difficult taxon, any of the following may occur:
1 or more ID at genus, 1 ID at subgenus, DQA “ID cannot be improved” because the IDer wants to take the observation out of “needs ID” and may not be paying attention to whether the community ID is the same as the observation ID.
2 IDs at genus, second IDer clicks the DQA, a third IDer comes along and suggests a subgenus. “ID cannot be improved” to make the observation RG would still be correct because a species ID is not realistic. Clicking “yes” to keep the observation from becoming casual is exactly the opposite of what one wants to do here.
1 ID to species, 1 non-disagreeing ID of genus, a 3rd ID to subgenus disagreeing with the species ID, DQA. First person withdraws their ID or adds a genus-level ID.
In all of these situations the observations now become casual. They should never be casual because they are not broken – there is nothing wrong with them except that the community ID and observation ID are not the same. They should remain at needs ID.
This change is not a minor side-effect of a fix for issues with how subspecies are treated. It has a huge impact on my regular IDing workflow for my ongoing attempt to clean up European Xylocopa observations and it seriously hampers the effectiveness of any strategy to try to manage the needs ID pile.
I also suspect it will result in affected observations becoming casual because a user didn’t happen to notice the effect of their action, and these observations are unlikely to ever get rescued because so few people look at casual observations.
As I wrote elsewhere, I think other changes will need to be implemented alongside this change in order to prevent it from creating new problems:
While they are at Research Grade now, I know this change will cause, at least the North American herpers and identifiers, to become more confrontational and/or snippy with people who don’t ID at their subspecies. I don’t typically ID at subspecies for herps (minus turtles), unless I am being lazy or the subspecies is a rare/protected/endangered subspecies (aka it gets auto-obscured). I know several IDers who don’t either, but I know many more who do ID at the subspecies, consistently. Having to disagree with a subspecies ID, in order to get it to research grade (as Bill did with the watersnake observation I linked), is annoying and obtuse, in my opinion. The reason is that it then requires 3 people to overcome the disagreement instead of the 2 needed to normally change it to a subspecies.
This change changes the ID habits of several identifiers and can toss many an observation into casual. Especially for groups that have multiple levels of genus, species, and/or variety (e.g. plants, butterflies, some birds, etc.), as @spiphany mentioned.
The gopher snake observations I linked, I wasn’t super concerned about them staying in “Needs ID” for very long, as the gopher/bull snake (Pituophis catenifer) identifiers use subspecies very consistently. It was more to give more credence to what I thought was a bug.
I did not know this change occurred, and to have this change suddenly happen with no announcement on the website or anything made me think it was a bug. The announcement was made in this very post on the forums. Let’s face it, the vast majority of iNat users don’t use/keep up with the forums, and a major change (even if it was a bug fix) should have had an announcement on the main website. This is, more or less, taking away a feature of how identifications work.
IMO, it should be that the ID goes research grade, but at the species level, until a second person does an agreeing subspecific ID. Basically, it would be as if two people IDed at the species level instead of the first ID being a subspecies and causing these issues.
Granted, it is easy for me to say, “You should do this.” I do not know how hard it would be to code that and/or if it would cause more technical issues down the line.
That Community and Observation taxon are in agreement is progress. Many iNatters did not know / notice - that 2 different IDs were displayed on an obs - and then RG could only apply to one of those. Which of the 2 was sent to GBIF?
I’m going to be blunt here: No it isn’t. Not as currently implemented, in which hundreds of observations may end up getting assigned to the limbo of casual for no reason whatsoever besides the fact that community and observation taxa are not the same. It’s great that it works for you, but this “minor fix” has created much larger and more serious problems than existed under the previous status quo.
The DQA “ID cannot be improved” has always been rather difficult and the previous implementation was not without its problems (e.g., the situation that motivated this particular bug report, where it enables an observation to become RG with a single species-level ID). But it is nonetheless an essential tool for managing the “needs ID” pile for those of us who work on difficult taxa, albeit one that is used far less frequently than it probably could or should be.
This change actively discourages use of the DQA, because now any change to a DQA’d observation that makes the observation ID different than the community ID will result in the observation becoming casual. It is very very easy to miss that this has happened.
It seems to me like an “ID cannot be improved” vote here would not be correct? The second identifier knows the community taxon can be improved since they’ve just added a refining ID.
Seems like the same situation, no? That third identifier shouldn’t be voting “no” here, as they know the ID can be improved beyond genus.
I agree this one is not good.
OK, so in this scenario:
ID 1 of P. cantenifer catenifer + ID 2 of P. catenifer (not disagreeing) = RG at P. catenifer, correct? And that’s how it used to work. (I personallyk also don’t like IDing most herps to subspecies, especially this species in the bay area)
Whereas now, ID 1 of P. cantenifer catenifer + ID 2 of P. catenifer (not disagreeing) = Needs ID with obs taxon at P. cantenifer catenifer and community taxon at P. catenifer. And it will remain that way if people add more non-disagreeing IDs of P. catenifer. It will only reach RG if someone adds an ID of P. cantenifer catenifer or someone adds a disagreeing ID of P. catenifer.
I think @spiphany is saying the second identifier voted, and the third identifier then refined the observation further, making the CID and OID different and presumably rendering the observation casual? (Though I haven’t tried it.) There seems no appropriate way for the third identifier to act in such a situation.
The sensible choice here is probably to add an identification that exactly confirms the previous ones; no more, no less. Forget about the refinements, except in a few rare cases.